Chief Delphi - How are final decisions made?

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Re: How are final decisions made?

On our team, we have brainstorming meetings where we all come up with ideas. Everyone presents their ideas, debates begin, hybrids are born, and eventually we have a couple really good ideas. From there, we debate the good points of each design, and eventually it all ends with a vote. We are a very student-led team, and we do almost everything for the robot ourselves, with the mentors just looking on and adding guidance, so their votes and opinions are well heard and hold a bit more sway, but generally it's everyone.

Re: How are final decisions made?

Quote:

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

In my 22 year career as an engineer I have never been in a meeting where technical decisions were made by the design team voting on options.

There are clear processes and measurement criteria for making engineering decisions that are functions of real system characteristics: cost, complexity of design, modularity, weight, power requirements, size, unknowns that have to be resolved (risk), manufacturability, reliability, repairabilty, resources required...

you can make a matrix with each characteristic across the top, and put each design approach on a row, grading each point on a scale from 1 to 5. The approach with the highest score is the best system.

There is no need to vote, unless two approaches come out exactly equal on the evaluation.

We have done this on FIRST teams - it makes a huge difference in the students attitudes. We can honestly say "I think your idea is awesome, but we are doing something different, for reasons you can clearly see". This goes over much better than a show of hands, and the resulting battered egos.

As always, Ken has our method down here. He beat me to it. It's no one's idea, and it's everyones. Argue in the asignment of ranking points - not in the design.

Heck - we even do this on design CONCEPTS... like a ball shooter, or a ball roller - before we even know what the designs will look like.

Re: How are final decisions made?

For the most part, our team is a combination of student- and mentor-led. Students bring up ideas and make decisions on their own. Other times, like with financial decisions, the mentors take a big part. Who decides anything really depends on the situation.