Re: The Stereotyping of Successful Teams
 

I absolutely agree. Every team should strive to strengthen their program, it makes FIRST, your students, your sponsors, your community, and your mentors look good.
It's absurd to be embarrassed at success, that is a fallacy pushed on by individuals who don't give the effort to be excellent.

Re: The Stereotyping of Successful Teams
 

For a thread about not stereotyping elite teams, there is an awful lot of stereotyping of low performing teams...

Perhaps the most alarming (and absolutely false) allegation is that these teams do not put in as much hard work or thought as the elite teams do. It just simply not true. All teams work hard and employ the resources available to them, as they should.

As far as eliminating bag and tag, I think a lot of people are over estimating the effect it would have for low performing teams. Time is already one of the most evenly distributed resources. Having a few extra weeks of (less productive) time comes out to be around 1.5x as much as teams that only work the 6 weeks. By contrast these same times may have 4 or 5 times as many members, vastly larger budgets, and (most significantly) many more mentors. I also suspect that the best teams would be able to use the extra time far better, making the gap between the best and worst teams wider not narrower.

Re: The Stereotyping of Successful Teams
 

Yes. There's this notion on CD that if you work really, really hard, and get as many sponsors as possible, you can be a "top team." As many lower tier teams can attest to, is simply isn't true.

In my experience, what makes the difference isn't really time or resources or whether or not a team makes a practice bot. It's the experience and intuition the real team leader has (it can be a mentor, or much more rarely a student) and their ability to cohesively lead the team. Combine that with ample amounts of time, machines and money, and an elite team is born.

Re: The Stereotyping of Successful Teams
 

Oh no this thread is back. :ahh:

I definitely respect what you are both saying. I can only speak for my own team and what changes pushed us forward. So when I say we "worked really hard", I am saying that we pushed ourselves in every possible way to exceed our previous expectations. It was not meant to be a value judgement about other teams.
As I mentioned very early in this thread, I do not pretend to know how every team operates. I simply was tired of other teams and individuals making assumptions about how we operate and further making assumptions about what are value system was.
We all have a tendency to oversimplify situations in an attempt to understand or categorize them. The real answer to success for any team is always much more complex and very specific to each team's situation. For some it may be a matter of mentorship, for others hard work or simply having more funding.
None of these items are a negative. You just have to critically analyze your team's situation regularly and be objective, even when you are having success.

Re: The Stereotyping of Successful Teams
 

The point is that time is NOT an evenly distributed resource as is. Teams, like my own, with substantial enough resources for a second practice robot and a full size practice field at our disposal have 4 months to work on the robot. Teams without these resources have 6 weeks followed by 2 and a half months of far less useful time. That's an oversimplification, but the point remains: high resource teams can work around the bag and tag limits while low resource teams are truly limited by them. And this stark difference between high resource and low resource teams is brought about by an arbitrary rule with its origins in logistical and practical reasoning for considerations that no longer apply. This is a point for another thread, but it is telling that the teams that inspire us most treat FRC as a 4 month season and not a 6 week project. That inspiration is what FIRST is all about.

On to the other point about stereotyping low performing teams. My team is a high resource team. However, in my four years on the team we have been both a low performing and high performing team. GSR 2012 was our worst performance in 22 seasons of team history whereas 2013 was one of our best seasons yet.

Both years I have been extremely proud of the effort my teammates and I put forward. However, recognizing that the results from 2012 were caused by MISGUIDED hard work, and doing the even harder work of changing to get better as a team and under respected leadership, allowed our hard work in 2013 to pay off. There are some low performing teams that are not trying as hard. There are also some that are trying just as hard or even harder. It is in no way cut and dry. What is critical is understanding the causes of low performance and what is necessary to get better. Either work harder or smarter. Or find more resources. Each situation will be unique, but having clear team goals with effective leadership will make a world of difference in directing efforts properly.

Re: The Stereotyping of Successful Teams
 

Sorry that I am coming to this discussion late. I hear these statements year after year about "successful teams". Have you noticed that those teams have:
1. Students who are really engaged.
2. Students who spend a lot of time researching, gathering data, working hard.
3. Have a team that functions as a team at all times.
4. Has been around for a while and although they add new tools every year they maintain what they have acquired in the past.
5. They build on their past accomplishments, analyze what works and what doesn't.
6. They spend their money wisely, because it is so precious.
7. Appear to have a mentor designed, mentor built, mentor maintained robot because of all of the above.

As far as adding something to the competition to "break the cycle", that already exists. It is called graduation. Every team gets new students every year and that changes the dynamic. New students, new parents, new ideas, new build teams, etc. How a team reacts to that change is what starts to separate the good from the great.

If you want to know a secret, using the Chairman's Award as a goal is a great way to organize your team function. Teams that begin to look at that as a goal start to think differently, act differently, organize their team differently, work and plan and look to the future differently. While some will look at that award as being unachievable, others will look and say "that's hard but we need to try".

Good Luck Miss Daisy!

Re: The Stereotyping of Successful Teams
 

This topic will never end...even after 10 years, FRC teams will be talking about this. Well one thing is for sure, every team started with little or nothing compared to what they have now. So the team members from veteran teams may not know the struggles a new team goes through. It is easy to say work your butt off and get sponsors...in real life, companies are not so generous to open their pocket, there may be few exceptions. Even the big companies that sponsors veteran teams don't take new teams unless they go through FIRST or some sort of association. Just thought one should know.

Re: The Stereotyping of Successful Teams
 

We have a very low success rate with cold calling corporations. Almost all of our corporate donors have parents of team members working for their corporation or that parent has used a personal relationship in some way to secure a donation. On occasion we will continue a relationship with the corporation after the student graduates.

I'd be surprised if more than 50% of our funding comes from donations though. The students work really hard all year to run half a dozen STEM based day camps, put on a huge science based carnival, rake leaves for a large apartment complex, and other small things.

All of this is happening along with several community outreach programs like FLL mentoring and volunteering at the Free to Breathe race/walk event for lung cancer research, and a multitude of public appearances which generate no funds.

PS: When we started the program in 2007 most of us would have walked away if someone had presented us with a full list of what the team does now. We grew into it, adding to our volunteer base along the way. Parents also continue to help the team long after their own students graduate. They get addicted just like the rest of us. :)

Re: The Stereotyping of Successful Teams
 

It is also easy to say that most teams get the majority of their funding from large sponsors. Generating money through fundraisers is the way to go in the long run. The more sustainable events you can create, and consistently organize, the better off you will be.

Nobody is saying that you need a big group of corporate donors to do well in FRC.

Re: The Stereotyping of Successful Teams
 

There is a huge difference between one team "working hard" and another. I don't think anyone is saying low performing teams don't work hard on their robots, that is just non-sense. Many times low performing teams work hard but they are working without well defined plans/expectations and towards a strategy that just isn't going to work. Or in many cases they work hard towards a strategy that is going to work but will perform at a level just below stellar/win every regional they attend. I firmly believe that a majority of FRC teams fall into this category and it is a dangerous rut that will take a lot of work to get out of. Its tough to lose when you have put so much time and effort into your robot that is very good but continually get eliminated in the quarter-finals/semi-finals or glanced over during alliance selections. Its often in these situations said teams looks at the elite/winning teams and start making allegations as to how they win and how they have their resources.

Every team faces unique challenges that lead to their performance so there isn't one equation that if you solve it your team will become successful. For some teams time management is their downfall. Others suffer bad game strategy in the early weeks. Others don't realistically know what/how to utilize the resources they have at hand to deliver the best robot they can. For me, I believe we suffer mainly in the design stage. Every year we nail down an extremely competitive strategy but by the time we have a good design of the robot we are drastically behind schedule and end up with a robot that just isn't quite what we wanted but still very good.

Re: The Stereotyping of Successful Teams
 

I think many, many teams underestimate the importance of developing a good team structure. If you go into FRC thinking it's all about the robot, you're doomed to be in the bottom tier of teams.

Successful teams have developed a system of team management that works for them. It lets them keep everything organized, train new (and returning) members in the off season, and proceduralizes the process of learning from year to year so a mistake is never repeated. An amazing amount of time is spent meeting about planing how things should go.

A successful team doesn't focus on build a robot. It focuses on build individuals and the team - the robot is simply the process you use to do that. If the team focuses on helping its members grow from year to year, then the team itself will grow as well.

To give you a few examples...

Just last week we had a meeting with our new captains for the upcoming season. It was 2 hours (and could have been longer) just to go over and understand the expectations of the position. We didn't talk (ignoring sidetracking) about specific plans for specific events... that comes later. In a couple of weeks, we'll have our planning meeting for the summer program, and once we get through the summer program, we'll have a planning meeting for the fall program. We don't use these planning meetings to figure out what we're going to do... the captains do that before hand and bring it to us. We use them to go over the plans and improve them where necessary. We figure out who's going to purchase what to make it a success. We assign responsibilities for the event. In short, the planning meeting isn't about the what... it's about the how of each specific event.

After each event we participate in, we have a meeting (with the whole team) to go over what went well and what didn't. We brainstorm ideas for improving things (only some of which deal with the robot... a lot more deal with process around handling things or strategy). We assign tasks and determine a meeting schedule to be successful.

There's a lot of process that surrounds a successful team. It's not just about showing up to build a robot.

Re: The Stereotyping of Successful Teams
 

This comment can end all of these threads on this topic.
The secret IS the Chairman's award.

PS. Not about the Robot.

Re: The Stereotyping of Successful Teams
 

Not as late as I. But, thankfully, you have said it all, leaving nothing for me to contribute ... except that your timing is perfect. Look at the post number (111) -- fitting, since this one is a classic. :)