I noticed your comments:
To parent stuff in the outliner, just hold down shift while dragging the object over another object.
If you need more speed, E-Cycles is dramatically faster for many scenes. Worth investing in to half your render times, and even more so on the newer Nvidia cards.
To improve overall workflows, do a little research in the add-on / plugins ecosystem. Nowadays there are add-ons to solve or improve anything in Blender - it's overwhelming.