[ChrisH]

The first thing to do is assign leadership roles. You absolutely must have a person in overall charge. They don't have to DO anything, at least not if they can get somebody else to do it. Their job is making sure that everyone else is doing what they are supposed to, and that everything is covered. They also need to be the guiding light for policy decisions.

You need a technical lead. This person makes the final decision on design and implementation matters. ie if you can't decide between two types of gripper, this is the person that makes the call. Let your technical lead organize the build stuff as he or she sees fit. We beak it down into Vehicle, Manipulator, Electrical, Programming and Systems.

The next most important person is the administrator. Most real engineers are lousy at this, otherwise they would be managers. But you need somebody to make sure all of the travel arrangements and "other stuff" like meals during build or whatever gets taken care of.

But really the most important thing is attitude. YOU MUST WORK TOGETHER. We have a rule on our team, once a decision is made, we don't revisit it or second guess. We do put a lot of care into making important decisions, but better to take an extra day or two than to go for three weeks down the wrong path.

Sometimes educators believe ideas are precious, and that every idea should be developed especially if the self-esteem of a student who came up with the idea is percived to be at risk. Engineers only tend to regard ideas that are practical and further the project as precious. This has been known to lead to conflict within the team. Indeed engineers often get passionate about the "right" way to do something.

It is important that these things be managed well. Maybe a student comes up with a great idea on how to accomplish a task, but it is build week 5 and implementing it will cause you to undo everything you've done since week 3 and take until week 8 to finish. Sorry, there is no week 8, better to stay with what you have. Most people will be OK with this if it is explained properly. No reason you can't try it out in the off-season if they are really adamant about trying it.

If you can manage the inevitable conflicts by saying "We are a team. We will get through this. We will do it together". Then you will have a great team no matter what and people will come back for more. If not, then you will probably wind up as at least a couple of teams, or worse half a team. While FIRST really wants us to expand the number of teams, I don't think doing it by spliting existing teams is what they have in mind.

To quote Mrs Chalsma (Team 362, the Muses)

"There is no I in TEAM"

Keep this in mind, treat one another graciously, always assume people are doing their best (even when they fail miserably), and you will find that things kind of come together on their own. The trick will be managing the adults, the kids will pretty much follow them.

At least that's been our experience,