[RoboMom]

This was mentioned by others earlier in the thread, but my experience has been that the teams often don't recognize they need help.

At Chesapeake, DC and Boston over the years there were usually more teams offering to help than teams asking for help.

Having someone coordinate can work. Sometimes the offers of help aren't quite the right kind at the right time (I'm remembering a certain well- intentioned building a bumper effort last year that actually took way too long of trial and error. And I had to step in and gently ask the helpers to please include the team, rather than pushing them out. Again, well intentioned, but needed a little tweaking.)

But often there are teams and mentors willing and able early on to help. It's the team that needs convincing. Last year I remember saying to quite a few teams, "you're out of time. We shut the pits at 8pm. The wait time to get inspected is at least 20 minutes. You need to get in line right now, for a partial inspection."

Partial is a magical word. It took the pressure off a bit, and still left open that chance that they could really finish that idea about some thingy they had their heart set on. (can you tell I'm not the engineering brains in the room?)

To me, the key is to get all this moving earlier, in a coordinated fashion, and is communicated to all the teams.
Triage.