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 "Every organization is perfectly designed to get the results it gets." -David Hanna Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to assess the effectiveness of your organization's engineering function: - Are you satisfied with the productivity and innovation of your engineering function as measured by whatever metrics you use (e.g., new business revenue per engineer, cost savings per engineer, etc.)?
- Can you define what your core competencies are (i.e., something your company does well that provides customer benefits, is not easy for competitors to imitate, and can be leveraged widely across many products and markets) and what you may need in the future?
- Is your engineering capacity easily scalable to ramp up for speed-to-market and ramp down during economic downturns without compromising your competitive advantage or losing effectiveness?
- Have you structured an appropriate amount of your engineering costs as variable versus fixed to deal with fluctuating workload?
- Do you appreciate the importance of domain knowledge and feel it is effectively developed within your organization?
- Can you identify the key engineering activities required to keep your business competitive?
- Are you comfortable with how your existing engineering workforce is deployed today (i.e., percent of workforce working on new ideas/developments versus maintaining/optimizing the current business)?
- Do you effectively leverage external resources to complement your internal technical workforce?
- Are you able to effectively recruit new technical talent (acceptance rate at least 75%)?
- Are you able to effectively retain the technical talent you have today (attrition less than 10%)?
- Do you have robust succession plans for key engineering positions?
- Do you have lean, standard processes to drive the efficiency of your engineering function and achieve extraordinary results from ordinary people?
- Have you established performance metrics to assess overall engineering effectiveness and communicate them on a regular basis?
If you were able to answer "yes" to all of these questions, you should be pleased with the results. However, if there are one or more areas where you answered "no" or "not sure", ES4T can help.
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