Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Hill
How do you guys do project management? Do you have design/concept reviews? What tools do you guys use to keep organized?
Also, somewhat off topic, we used a modified version of the 254 part management tool (cheesy parts) this year and it was fantastic. It really helped us especially get orders put together. Instead of writing orders down on a marker board or a piece of paper that can get lost, it was great to have everything organized the way it was.
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Our team's project management is still not as clean and organized as we'd like it to be. We do still use Cheesy Parts but only really as a method of generating part numbers so we can label CAD files according to their assembly and not overlap file names. For example: "254-16-P-0308" is a shaft in the 0300 drive gearbox assembly.
Project management is largely run by a team of core technical mentors (Travis, Cory, Colin, Nick, Pat) and the student FRC Technical Director. We'll sometimes write a To-Do List on a whiteboard and have a brief meeting at the beginning of the build during dinner to cover what we want to accomplish that night.
Other than Cheesy Parts and whiteboards, a big portion of the project management relies on mentors and upperclassmen being in constant attendance so they can manage what they're working on. By only having builds Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday this year we got higher attendance at each and that helped ensure there was always an available project leader.
Design reviews often occur unofficially, late at night, or just with relevant students and mentors. By not having "too many cooks in the kitchen" we can keep them concise and on topic. However, we notably had a team-wide discussion a few days after kickoff to finalize our decision to go with the "Steph Curry" robot (see Tech Binder pg 5).
In the past we tried project management softwares like Trello but gave it up because the hassle of constantly entering and editing meant our students didn't keep it up to date.
Finally, we have an Action Items project management page that our student Leaders use for mostly non-technical action items assigned to them as weekly leader meetings. An example might be "Call welding sponsor and ask if they will sponsor us again".