Like evreyone above me has mentioned, the Team Handbooks that teams post are very good places to find examples for a team structure. I've went through several of them to try to find some tips to the structure that I wanted my team to have when I was the appointed the CEO for one of the years.
Most teams have the same roles (just in different names) and same heirarchy, and they usually vary from different reasons:
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Team size: Usually bigger teams would like to spread the work between all of the students and to give them all a chance to be part of the doing. These teams have the leasure to have various sub-teams, and sometimes even create sub-sub-teams under those sub-teams since the area of work of the two sub-sub-teams is under the catagory of the sub-team (for example, 1 sub-sub-team of the Shooter mechanisim and 1 sub-sub-team of the Collector mechanisim, which are both under the Operation sub-team)
Smaller teams don't always have a lot of set of hands which know how to work in a certain criteria, say, only one guys knows the programming the best then anyone else in the team. These teams would prefer to have a smaller set of sub-teams. Those smaller teams can also work like the bigger teams, by giving multiple roles for certain members that are really dedicated, but sometimes that could be risky, depending on the type of roles a member is given.
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School/Teachers/Parents/Students: Some schools, teachers and parents will restrict some of the students authority in the team. Some schools will assign the teacher as the team leader or (also) as the responsible for the team's financial aspects, due to the students being, well, students - they are not adult enough to handel financial subjects.
Other restrictions will be the hours of work. Parents won't want their kids to work 24/7, and the parents and teachers wouldn't want the students to have their grades drop due to their time spent on the robotics project.
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Dedication: The overall dedication and hours the students and mentors will want to spend on the project will define how the structure of the team will be. No reason to add other sub-teams like Animation and Vizualization (applying for the Autodesk Awards) if your team wants to work only on the robot and doesn't want to spend their time on the 3d softwares.
I think this question will help you a bit in trying to understand what team structure you want:
Why have a Mangment role in the team?
A: You have decided on having the different and basic sub-teams in your team's orginization - Software, Electronics, Mechanics. Each sub-team is in charge of one part of the robot.
If you have a small team, and the robot is pretty simple, it means that each member sees the other members and gets to spend more time with them and create a better bond between them. If that happens, co-operation goes much more easier in the team, and when each sub-team needs something from the other sub-teams (Mechanics need to know that their new mechanisim works, so they need Electronics to wire the motors and Programming to write a test code to see that the basics of the mechanisim works) because of the close bonds between the team members, the other members will understand the nessecities of their team-mates and will be willing to help them out.
If you have a large team, and the robot is planned to have various complicated areas in it, like a multiple-swivle-woosh-bang-bang arm mechanisim (you can see I am no mechanical guy
) which is really fast and really powerful, a set of a dozen laser and ion particale sensors to have more presicion on the aim of the arm, the speed of the robot and obstruction evasion AND a neo-Dean-Kamen Algorithm that calculates all the information in 0.00000001 miliseconds pre loop (....Ok, you get my point) - each sub-team will be busy with itself on trying to devlope these crazy stuff.
At some point, one of the sub-teams will need the assistance of another sub-team to do some tests so they can continue their work. There will be soo many projects within the project of building the robot in 6 weeks that could be just too much for everyone.
You need that Management team/guy to look over everything that's going on in the team, check the time schedule and sometimes give the bad news of: "I'm sorry, there just isn't enough time to do what you're planning to do...that is the..."Helicopter Rotor System for Robot Aviation"...?"
The management team needs to be the contact between all sub-teams and to give out a request from one sub-team to another, when there is just too much work to personally contact the other sub-team.
The management team can also take care of other orginizational subjects, such as the finance, communication with other groups (The school, the parent, the local offical FIRST contact, other teams, etc...), public relations and other logistic part of the team.
Hope I've helped and good luck with building your team's structure.
