The posts before this seem to cover the team structure and schedule suggestions adequately. Here are a few technical lessons learned from my rookie year 6 years ago.
1) Pin all shafts, set screws will slip. My rookie year was Aim High and we had a conveyor belt feeding the balls into our shooter and we used set screws on a flattened shaft thinking it would be fine. It wasn't.
2) Weigh the robot frequently with a good scale capable of handling the entire robot. We used a bathroom scale our rookie year, doing the half a robot at a time method and had to cut 12 lbs in the pits on Thursday. That was ugly.
3) The 28" X 38" X 60" envelope is inviolate. You have to put your robot in a box of those dimensions and there is no slop. Build your chassis an inch shorter, we do 27"X37"X59" to account for bolt heads, and unsquare frames. My rookie year we were putting our robot against a wall and bashing it to square it up to fit.
4) Use locknuts during your build. We initially used regular nuts while building, and were going to locktite everything at the end. We basically lost a couple nights, unbolting every bolt to loctite the nuts. Using locknuts at the beginning saves a lot of time at the end. You will need some locking feature on all threaded fasteners or else your robot will vibrate itself to its inevitable doom.
That's just the list of rookie mistakes I made. We had no idea what we were getting into, and didn't learn about Chief Delphi till my second year. You already have half the battle fought by knowing to ask for help here.
And this thread lists a lot of other good technical lessons learned:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=89568