[Jon Stratis]

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.