Experienced Teams' Advice
 

This year was my team's rookie year. We had 12 kids come out for the team, and we won Rookie Allstar and will be traveling to St. Louis. We have had almost enough interest from other students where we plan on having more than three times the size of our team for next year. I was the only captain of the team, and the only form of organization was loosely put together subsystems. (like programming, electrical, and hardware which was divided into more sub levels). My question is to the larger more veteran teams. How do your teams implement organization, where everybody gets to work where they want but not everybody is working at the same job?

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

Wow, I was just thinking about starting a thread like this. We're in a pretty similar boat. We have officers and organization, but I feel like it probably won't be able to scale to our predicted size for next year without some modification.

P.S. Congrats on Rookie All-Star! See you at Champs

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

Subteams is actually a pretty good way to keep things organized. However, you have to use some caution when putting people on them; put someone who just wants to program onto mechanical and look out!

What you can do is have everyone list their top two-three subteams. If you have too many in one, you can bump a few to their second one which has fewer.

Suggested subteam breakdown: Mechanical (which includes Drivetrain and Scoring Device subteams), Electrical, Programming, Everything Else. It should be noted that Everything Else is your marketing, fundraising, and such-like groups, which will presumably be rather small for a while. They can split out later as you grow. The most critical subteams on the list? Drivetrain and Everything Else.

You'll also need to talk between subteams quite often. In fact, you should probably go as a full team until after Week 1 of build, to make sure that everyone's on the same page with what's happening. Every subteam needs to talk to every other subteam that interfaces with them quite regularly.

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

First of all one of the most important things you can do is work during the off-season to get your team organized. If you have 40 people show up to kickoff next January with relatively no idea what is going on you will most likely have chaos on your hands. I suggest having regular meetings over the summer to develop skills and to help kids find out what the like and don't like. Then have your team leadership work with some of the student leaders (not necessarily elected leaders but students who took initiative this year) to develop a team organizational plan. The Simbots have a great workshop on this found here.

After the students learn about all of the different sub-teams let them sign up for sub-teams they would like to be apart of. I would let them sign up for as many as they are interested in and once the work starts they will settle into a couple they really enjoy. If you find you have an immense imbalance in your sub-teams, you can ask students if they would be willing to work on teams that need help. The most important thing is to make sure everyone is enjoying what they are working on. If they don't they won't be getting the most out of their FIRST experience and more likely than not your team will be getting less than optimal results.

As far as your specific team is concerned I know nothing about you mentor base but I would also suggest having a specific mentor that either leads or can help the sub-team in case they run into any issues. This will keep any one mentor from becoming overwhelmed. Along with mentors it may be helpful depending on the makeup of your team to have student leads in all of these groups. It helps individuals develop leadership skills and gives the sub-team someone to look to for direction. This student lead and mentor should work very closely in order to make sure each sub-team is accomplishing its goals and that those goals are in line with the overall team goals.

These are just general suggestions and if you have any questions feel free to PM me or just post back here.

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

Eric pretty much got it.

We have about 6 or 7 major (meaning each student is assigned to one primarily) subteams a year. Promotions (the equivalent of most team's marketing teams), software, electrical, and about 4 mechanical teams, divided into each aspect of the physical robot; typically drives, acquisition, elevation/storage/body and usually a special team for what's game-specific.

When kids submit applications for their teams, they number three of these teams in order of most interest. Students are usually placed in the team they sign up, but if team leadership feels otherwise, they aren't. For example, when I signed up for software my Sophomore year and was placed on a mechanical team, I was told it was to expand my horizons. Which it did. So things like that may occur, if you feel it's necessary.

Most importantly, make sure everyone is OK with their assignment. Unhappy students are unproductive workers. Also, don't pair up 2+ people who you think can't work together on the same subteam (not for reasons of dislike, but
for reasons of lack of focus).

I hope this helps, feel free to ask if you need any help.
-Leeland

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

We have 40 students and use the subteam method as well.

This year we broke into:
-turret, gun, and hood
-Chassis and internal collector
-Bridge handler and external collector
-bridge balancer "stinger"
-Website
-Chairman's Award
-janitorial services ;)

Our system for putting people in groups is to write the groups up on the whiteboard and allow the students to put their name under the group that they most want to work in. Then the mentors will later switch the names around to spread around the more experienced students so there is not one "awesome" group with all the seniors and one lowly group of all freshmen. These groups are then headed by either one or two mentors who control their "minions." Every though we all work in the same shop, in order to maintain continuity between groups at the end of every meeting all the groups meet back together in the confrence room to discuss/ show what they did today and they're goals for the near and distant future. For us this is key to the success our subgroup system.

Regards, Bryan

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

Go here -> http://www.simbotics.org/resources/workshops

Simbotics have put together an incredible amount of resources for team organization and technical advice for certain sub-teams. Start reading the "Running a Team" document and apply it to your situation! This is my ninth season in FRC and I go back to these documents all the time for advice on team leadership.

They even have an iPhone app!

Thanks 1114!

-Mike

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

When everybody writes down their preferred sub levels, how do you ever fill the position of marketing and fundraising? I ended up taking over both those jobs this year, and I doubt anybody would want to do those. Do these jobs get assigned to the newer members (like freshmen), and then with time they work themselves up to more experience jobs?

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

Subteams are definitely the way to go.

Try to keep some low level of activity going through the summer (picnic, off-season event, etc.) and be prepared to do your subteam training in the fall, before kickoff.

Don't go overboard on the robot next year. A lot of second year teams (like ours) think they are seasoned experts and try to bite off more than they can chew (technically). Keep it simple and focus on building the team.

Congratulations on the rookie all-star!

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

On our team fundraising (recruiting sponsors) is done during the offseason and the entire team is involved. During the season is far to late to begin gathering money.

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

Team 3322 has an engineering side and a business side due to the fact that we have 46 students. Each side of the team has a co-captain, while there is one captain overall (me).

In the engineering side, we have the following sub-teams:
Drive-train
Effector (bridge tipper, shooter, bridge balancer)
Programming - LabView
Programming - C++
Electrical

In the business side, we have the following sub-teams:
Media/PR (Pit design, Chairman's, WFA)
Website

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

How do the sub-teams make the whole robot compatible? Say the shooter/lifter needed X amount of space, and the bridge lowering mechanism need to use some of the area that the shooter/lifter space is using. When it is all done with and you have two mechanism that need valuable space on your robot, which gets presidence? These are some issues that 3397 ran into this season, so this thread is very helpful for us too.

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

You'll be surprised how many people love doing this kind of thing, whether or not they want to be engineers. I'm one of them. We pick one person to lead the fundraising with the fundraising mentor, and that person works with teammates to make presentations, write letters, and scout out businesses that could potentially sponsor us.

Encourage everyone to work on fundraising and PR. It makes you appreciate the competition more than just coming in to build the robot.

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

This is part of what I was talking about with the subteams work together on the whole concept/design, then every time it looks like there's a conflict of space or a tough interface, both subteams involved get together and talk it out until a solution is found.

In this case, as soon as someone figured out the problem, you should have started talking. Could the brige mechanism be moved? What about the shooter/lifter? Could you link them somehow? Or redesign one to avoid the other? All sorts of options if both subteams talk it over.

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

Meet maybe 6-10 times between start of school and mid-December, and have people actually build a robot. That way, everyone learns the exact skills they need for Build Season, so after Kickoff and Design Week, you can get to work without having to teach everyone how to (name a task).

Design Week is written about many times on CD, do some searching to get an idea on how to spend your first week after Kickoff.

If the Design is done well (and that's not easy) you end up with many "components" that are parts of an "Assembly" which makes up a subsystem (like Drivetrain, manipulator, control system, etc.).

If each team member gets a piece of paper with the design specs for a Component, you send them off to go fabricate it, and they are busy until they are done. It takes someone who can keep track of a million details, make sure people are working and not goofing off, that the time & weight budget aren't slipping, and more (known as a Project manager).

So the trick is to keep handing out papers that tell people what to work on next, to keep them busy. Very hard to do, but if you can pull some of that off, you'll be very pleased with the results.

+1 on Subteams BTW. Electrical also handles Pneumatics.

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

I haven't read the whole thread but in short, we see what all the students want, then we assign them what the team needs. Not everyone always gets what they want.

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

Believe it or not, this is a concern for even experienced/veteran teams. Every team has their own sort of style for handling this organization. I know some teams that have strict role restrictions while others simply have a come one, come all attitude.

It is important in these formative years for your team to determine what style best fits you. Flash 1319 has had a variety of styles as our team has grown over the years. One strategy that we implement involves pre-season work. By bringing students onto the team before Kickoff, mentors and students can determine what interests them. People will tend to gravitate towards certain areas. So come up with little projects or lessons to test people's interests. For example, you could attend off-season events or simply work on this year's robot to get it functioning properly for demonstrations.

Once the season begins, you can begin organizing individual work sessions for the groups (i.e. electrical groups, mechanical groups, programming, etc.) When you go to competition, the roles remain the same and hopefully students will be so immersed into their roles that they won't wander off aimlessly. I personally don't like restricting our students' roles. When I was on the team as a student, I was the safety captain, the operator, as well as part of the "pit crew."

If you have students on the team who are interested in organization and business pursuits, encourage them to work with a mentor to develop a team organization chart. Hope this helps. :)

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

Jengles, first off congratulations on the Rookie All-Star award and being the 5th seed. You guys looked great.

Second, as far as scaling, if you want to talk in depth about it we could probably arrange for some of your leaders and our leaders to get together to chat. (After Championships.) Either down at St. Charles or maybe at some sort of central location around campus. I am sure our team leaders would be happy to talk to you. Perhaps at the Connect A Million Minds Invitational in June if you will be there? (For anyone interested, my plug is at the bottom of the post.)

As others have said, you try to find out what kids want to do and try as much as possible to give them that, but keep an eye on what the team needs. I have found that most kids, if they are asked to switch to a different subteam because we think they have the talent to do well, are generally agreeable to the change. One good thing is that as the team gets larger, you generally have enough people to fill all of the critical needs. We try to recruit kids to fill needs. If we know a lot of electrical people are graduating, we will go out and look for kids in school who might be interested in it.

This is particularly true for the Chairman's Award / PR / Outreach people. Our current Engineering Director got recruited mostly because she was good at writing and speaking, she also turned out to be a really good engineer and our best CAD person this year. But she recruited her replacements for the communications team. There are kids who get enthusiastic about putting together and delivering presentations. We do get everyone on the team involved in those activities.

Also, we are planning to expand out training day (the one you guys came to at Coffman in December) this coming fall, with a veteran-focused training day earlier in the fall and then another for people new to first in December. Part of the earlier training day would be talking about strategies for organizing and recruiting as you scale up in size.



For everyone out there in CD land, the 3rd Annual Connect A Million Minds Invitational will be June 23rd. It is moving this year to Dublin Coffman High School (but will still be air conditioned) but is still be put on by our sponsors at Time Warner and the Central Ohio Robotics Initiative. There is information at www.growrobotics.org.

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

I would have to second this. The team I am currently working with won Rookie All Star two seasons ago. They made some strategic decisions in the design of this year's robot that are hurting them now and are very difficult to recover from.

Your trip to St Louis is a golden opportunity for you. Look through the "Robot Showcase" and "Extra Discussion" subforums and the tournament results. Make a list of the teams who are doing well and have well thought out robot designs. Make a list of intelligent questions that you would want to ask those teams (regarding team organization, robot design philosophy, strategy, etc.) Use the pit maps to find them at the World Festival, make sure they are not about to go for a match and ask your questions, listen and take notes. All of the top teams we have talked with have been very gracious and generous, sharing their experiences and ideas freely. If you are really lucky, an established team in your area will take you under their wing.

We let the students choose areas that they wanted to work on but we also made it clear, up front, that they may have to work in other areas.

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

Congratulations on the RAS. I am glad to see you are thinking ahead. I would highly recommend asking Ed Law (mentor 2834) for some advice on this subject. His team is now in their 4th year, and I think he would have a more relevant perspective than many of these teams that have been around for 10 years (not that you are getting bad advice, but most of it has little to do with growing pains).

I remember specifically his concerns when they had a lot of success their first year, and the 3X as many members their 2nd year (I believe they went from 8 to 24 members that year). They have since grown into a wonderful team. They consistently do well both on and off the field, and each year strive to do a bit more. In my opinion, they are a strong role models for rookie teams as they were a 100% pure rookie (no team members previous to FRC).

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

We do use a larger sub-team model similar to what others have mentioned on this thread. We have Mechanical, Electrical, Software and Spirit subsections (Spirit handles essentially everything that one of the other sections doesn't do).

We really don't have mechanism specific sections like others have mentioned. Instead, we specialize based on skills, not based on which part of the robot needs to be worked on. For example, the robot was CADed this year by a small team, and parts were machined by another "sub team."

I've found that this type of division allows people to become very knowledgeable about their craft, and still feel like they really contributed. While one person might take pride in designing the robot, others would feel that they contributed by writing all of the software or machining all the parts.

Re: Experienced Teams' Advice
 

From the years I've been competing, here's some mistakes that I've seen many teams, including ours, fall to. Once you become an established team (6+ years), you can be more tolerant to not following my two cents.

1. Never underestimate the power of KISS. Everyone wants to make the awesome creative robot, but especially at this young of an age, realize what you can do and do that very well. Then you can focus on the other factors.
2. It is unwise for the Baker to starve himself. It's harmful for both teams if you try to help others without having anything worthy and expendable to offer.
3. Many teams get easily impressed by the top tier teams and make the mistake of trying too many things in one year. Instead, dedicate one team-making component to one year. Start off with the drive train. This way, even if you hit a bump later on, you still have a reliable drive.
4. Whatever strategy you vote on, stick to it. Do not look back for too long, especially in Week 6. Which leads to the next point:
5. The best solution to a problem during competition is rarely the most radical. Commit and improve, not invent.
6. Avoid the oligarchy.