Highlights
The evaluation questionnaire consists of 110 questions to assess your project engineering against global best practices.
In addition, the questionnaire allows for two specific analyses:
- evaluation of "Lean Engineering" practices compared to other more standard practices
- consolidation of evaluations by type of actionable driver according to the Wevalgo organisational model
The technical development may be performed in-house or externalised; an initial question enables to choose between the two situations and the questionnaire adapt itself (management of internal development or management of external contractors performing the development); equipments, component or parts may be manufactured outside.
Wevalgo framework for the assessment of Project Engineering in 'single' client product delivery

Brief description of the questionnaire
Strategy and standardisation
- Innovation strategy: definition of the strategy and its goals, long-term action plans
- Customer and technology roadmaps: existence of a summary with anticipated planning for both the client needs and the new technologies
- Standardisation: standardisation strategy of the product platforms, systems, sub-systems...
Performance Management
- Strategy and finance: monitoring of the cost aligned with strategic components; departmental and project financial tracking,
- Operations: non financial tracking methods and KPIs
Client management
- Client needs: client needs understanding and methods to identify them
- Bid management: methodologies and resources to manage client Call for Tender
- Requirements management: recording of all requirements, functional specification usage, compliance management
- Change request: external and internal change requests management : impact analysis, solution development and validation, communication
- Contract and warranty: contract and warranty management processes from initial bid management to end of warranty
Organisation and human assets
- Organisational structure: local and global (if several locations) organisation structures, resource pooling, allocation of responsibilities between organisational units and along the project entire duration
- Human assets: organisational climate, soft skills and technical competences
- Competences and knowledge: mechanisms to ensure people growth and to share engineering knowledge
- External network: management of the external stakeholders (universities, partners, governmental bodies...)
Operations
- Project team: organisation and roles of the people involved in an engineering project
- Project management: plannings, reviews, KPIs, action plans and decision taking
- Subcontractors and suppliers: subcontractors and suppliers management practices, purchasing and Engineering collaboration
- Technical process: design, development and test methodologies
- Development process: overall management of the engineering process such as a stage-gate, V-cycle or any equivalent methodology (optional, depending on in-house or external development)
- Resource allocation: staff allocation to projects, resource needs forecast, monitoring
- Software and tools: technical software applications, telecommunication tools, specific tool to support technical development
Specific analyses when used for evaluation
Specific analysis that this questionnaire enables to perform
A structured "Pyramidal" model for Research and Development comparing with best practices
- the questionnaire is built with more than 110 questions based on process development best practices evaluations enabling to compare your organisation with world top performers
- structured in 5 categories and 21 areas, enabling to identify strengths and improvement opportunities both in a detailed and a consolidated view
- structure along two dimensions to better understand your performance
- a functional dimension: how are the Engineering functions or processes managed,
- a project dimension: how are the engineering projects managed.
Normative questions
For each best practice, the question is very precise and the answers choices are almost systematically normed to facilitate the evaluation and mostly to avoid subjectivity
For example, some evaluations use a norm derived from CMMI; for others we have defined specific norms.
According to the practices, evaluation criteria used are, for example:
- formalisation and detailed level,
- quality and scope coverage,
- people ownership and effective usage level,
- roles and responsibilities clarity.
A model built on practical experience of best practices
This model is built on the extensive management consulting experience of international Research and Development functions; each of its best practice has been observed in real conditions
« Lean Engineering» Evaluation
Our whole model fully embeds the Lean principles; we have adapted the manufacturing Lean principles to Engineering as illustrated below
Even if « Lean Engineering » is almost everywhere in our model and best practices, the questions with the most practical Lean practices are tagged so that the result report displays how this First Level of Lean is implemented.
Lean waste | Our adaptation to Engineering |
Defects | Misunderstood or unclear requirements, innefective design reviews, poor usage of technical processes or engineering stage-gates |
Overproduction | Unnecessary requirements or design features, lack of standards, misalignment between new technologies and project requirements |
Transportation | Unnecessary movement of people or information: inappropriate engineers location, project handovers |
Waiting | Waiting for decision, ineffective planning |
Inventory | Activities or expensive materials orders performed too much ahead due to ineffective plannings or resource allocation |
Motion | Unnecessary activities to perform work: informal, unstructured, not integrated or duplicated data; unfit supporting tools |
Over processing | Unnecessary validations, complex design or tests, too many reports |
Skills & “brain waste” | Poor competence management and allocation, lack of training, lack of learning loops |
Wevalgo organisation model
The evaluation defines the actionable drivers for the identified improvements enabling concret action plan definition:
- Leadership & People: leadership capabilities, competences, social climate and values
- Strategy & assets: organisation strategy, technology, tangible and intangible assets
- Organisation: organisational structure, roles and responsibilities
- Steering: decision making, actions and performance indicators management
- Process: process, operating procedures and rules definition
- Tools: decision making tools, process support tools, software applications
- Implementation: effective implementation of strategy, organisation, steering, processes and tools
Key steps
The best practices are accessible directly after purchase. In case of usage to evaluate the practices the following steps apply
- The service manager* can directly carry out an evaluation by answering the questionnaire (optional); steps 2 to 4 are optional depending on whether he/she wishes to invite other participants to carry out the evaluation
- If he/she wishes to invite other participants to conduct the evaluation, he/she proceeds to steps 2 to 5
- Otherwise he/she goes directly to step 5 of viewing the results
- He/she can still do his evaluation after the participants if he did not do it at the beginning
- Customisation of the service to the organisation by the service manager*
- Service name, title and introduction for the participants invited
- Selection of participants to the service
- Definition of dimension to enable analysis by organisation dimension (optional)
- Selection of anonymity option
- Sending of an invitation link to the selected participants
- Evaluations performed by selected participants, on the Wevalgo web platform
- Participants connect to Wevalgo web site thanks to the link sent by the service manager
- Participants answer on-line
- The service manager can follow up the answers progress status
- Results available at the end of evaluations on the Wevalgo website
* The service manager is the person who purchased the service.
Recommended participants for an evaluation
For the evaluation we recommend the following participants:
- Engineering top management team
- A few technical area managers
- A few project managers
- A selection of a few people outside of Engineering : sales and marketing, purchasing, manufacturing manager...
- In case of several geographical sites, a selection of site managers, enabling to compare the practices between the different sites.
Get instant and full access to reports as soon as evaluations are completed.
Gain multi-level analysis on several axis that can be explored in varied depths and dimensions through a user friendly results menu. A few samples of the results report are shown below
Heat map
Visualise the performance and their drivers at a glance across all categories and sub-categories
Results by organisational dimension
Compare performance across your own, relevant and entirely customisable organisational dimensions. For example by geographical locations, departments, hierarchical levels or any other you see fit. Zoom in to breakdowns by category, subcategory and/or question
Results by evaluator and category
You can see detailed results to better understand the causes of your organisation performance
Wevalgo excellence model Results
Get valuable insight into areas and axes of progress thanks to our embedded Wevalgo model. Other analytical models may be incorporated, see key concepts for more information)
We have expert consultants on hand to build their own evaluations, assist you and interpret your results. Select the Expert Review option on the purchase menu.