Engineering performance management: balancing creativity and discipline

The best engineering organizations, by design, encourage and support a culture of creativity and technical excellence. However, those attributes sometimes contribute to a resistance to strict budgets and tight schedules.

At a glance

• Technology-focused company founders are often visionaries who built cultures that reward technical excellence and celebrate the spirit of getting it right—at any cost.
• That approach to engineering organizational design—and its regard for cost as a secondary measure of engineering success—can have underwhelming results for overall company performance.
• Performance management and productivity improvement have historically been secondary considerations in engineering organizations, but in today’s business climate, they should be a priority.