Gabe,
How your team is
organized is not nearly as important as how well it
communicates. Communication means that people speak, and people listen, and that they do it on
all of the appropriate time scales. This means everything from the wiring team letting programming know that "yes, the battery is installed and you can load code now" to travel plans to robot design to passing on knowledge (aka mentorship). It also means that everyone knows who has what decision authority and respects it. If your organization supports communication for your people, it's a good way to organize. If your organization inhibits or even doesn't support communication, tweak it or replace it as needed. If two people are speaking at the same meeting at the same time and it isn't corrected promptly,
you have a problem. If a decision is made and the people who need to know (or even worse implement) the decision don't know the decision or ignore it, you have a
serious problem.
Remember, the
FIRST mission is to inspire, recognize, and prepare people for careers in STEM. You don't have to beat the powerhouse teams to do this, but especially as a leader you should always strive to
make the most of the assets that your team has. Pick a strategy and stick with it (unless you
explicitly decide to change it). And OBTW, you can neither stick with a strategy nor change it unless you've....
communicated it.
Be flexible. Don't stick to an organizational structure if you don't have the team members to pull it off. If there is no one person with all the skills required to be a team captain or department lead, maybe you need to assign two people with complementary skills to be co-captains or co-leads. Or vice-versa.
And on a related note, let me repeat a highlighted post I saw recently:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay Trzaskos
Your second year in FIRST is your first year as a mentor.
|
One of our sophomores this year won our "tribal knowledge" award for student mentoring, and another sophomore won our GP award. The team didn't win any awards in 2014, or even qualify for eliminations, but I know we did
something right last year. Don't just teach STEM fundamentals; evangelize the mission and ethos of
FIRST and your team.