[Bomberofdoom]

Originally Posted by big1boom

Sounds like what I am doing this season.

To get your team to perform, ORGANIZE. My team went over our project plan with a CATERPILLAR project manager and laid out every task from now until robot ship. This project plan is checked and updated at every meeting. Another way we organize is by having progress reports at the end of each meeting. We do these through our website so everyone can access them. Basically the progress reports go over what happened during the meeting, and what has to happen next to stay on track with our project plan. The progress reports help quantify the amount of work that happened, and also make is so that we don't rely on a core group of people to continue progress.

With the organized approach, it is very easy to see exactly what needs to be done, and when it needs to be done by. This puts a sense of urgency into everyone so that they work harder.

Right on!
In off-season, Build a template for each year, what are the general type of missions that are usually common when building each year's robots, define the process of each mission.
When the game is revealed, after brainstorming ideas and choosing a strategy for the robot, start defining specific missions, an estimate of how long they take, what missions are required to be completed beforehand, and how many members are needed to accomplish the task. These will help give a very clear picture of what is planned and what is needed to fit the planned timelines of the schedule.
This kind of thing is called a gantt chart. Using MS Project will help you build a dynamic gantt chart that you can input the progress and really see how the project is advancing, if the current progress will allow the team to reach a finished robot by the time of the robot shipment, and what is slowing that progress if not.

In addition to the gantt chart, having each team member write a progress report can really help each member and the sub-teams leaders and the team leader to understand what everyone understands of the current situation of the team's progress and what might be wrong if progress is slow.

HarveyAce,
As for now, I think you should talk with your mentors and teachers and define what each sub-team needs to do in the next week and let them define what each team member needs to do to accomplish the sub-team's missions. Try as much as you can to understand if each team member, including the less active ones, really understands what his missions are and what he needs to accomplish. Don't be too harsh, but try to explain to the team, after they have been defined those missions, that their roles are vital to completing the robot, otherwise there might not be finished robot by the time of the robot shipment. Once again, not too harshly.