[GeeTwo]

We haven't yet settled on a well-defined procedure yet, but we've been making improvements each year. While we've always done some sort of high level strategy as part of the design, in previous years the two processes were intermingled and the strategies were not properly correlated to the actual rules, but the kickoff video. Our first three years, we spent too much time on design (two to four weeks before we decided what the robot would look like), with too little time for construction, but last year we went too far (high level design selected on kickoff day).
competition robot lagging by a few days to a week.
We did one mock kickoff on 7 Nov (based on FIRST Overdrive), and will spend our meetings the week before kickoff going over our procedures for kickoff day through design week and a rough timeline through build season and competition season.
This year, we are inviting two rookie teams (and perhaps other local teams) to join us for kickoff day in our school auditorium; we plan to send a minimal contingent to the kickoff at Stennis so we can get started as soon as we get the password to unlock the game manual. We have a group of self-starters who have been studying strategy and who are committed to an in-depth reading of the rules to determine viable strategies. Meanwhile, other groups will be doing quick prototypes and rough-designing mechanisms and perhaps whole-robot drawings to determine the resources (time, money, weight, current) needed and estimate the capacity to do various tasks.
Around the middle of the first week, we will then select a strategy (with a possible backup), and begin evaluating the mechanisms and designs against the resources and payoff for the selected strategy to select high level design (again, with possible backups). Our plan is to have transitioned to detail design and specific prototyping by the Saturday after kickoff. We will then begin ordering components we don't have, refine the design details, and begin construction of the practice robot, with construction of the competition robot lagging the practice robot by about a week, so we can incorporate lessons learned. The goal is to have the practice and competition robots be functionally equivalent, varying only in decorations and whatever holes we drilled and abandoned on the practice robot.