How is your team structured?

[nickbrickmaster]

My team has historically had a single captain, with a single tier of sub-team captains, with authority over the students in their sub-team. These roles are ill-defined, and leave some students thrust into leadership positions. We've been thinking about how effective this is for our situation, and what could be done better. So I pose this question to all of you:

How is your team structured?

Do you have a captain, a president, multiple co-captains, a supreme dictator, or do you have no student leadership at all? Do you have a flat structure, where everyone is equal rank, or many sub-tiers of captains, nested almost fractally?

In addition, how effective is this structure? How many students do you have?

If you have "job descriptions" so to speak, for these leadership positions, please share. What responsibilities are prescribed to them? Are these positions elected, volunteered, or mentor-chosen?

I'm generally thinking about students when I ask this question, but feel free to share how mentors fit in.

[orangelight]

Pages 6-18 from here
It works out pretty well for our 60 person team

[scott.smith]

We have officer positions, which are President, who handles outreach and build season happenings, and is the "face of the team". The build team manager (or vice president) is the main director during the build season, and oversees the overall robot construction. We also have personal relations, outreach, and treasurer, whose names are self explanatory, and admin, who takes attendance and handles the counting of volunteer hours, to see which kids are slacking for that month. (Necessary 4 hours of volunteering every month per person) We also have heads for each team (CAD, machining, electronics, programming, pneumatics, and media) who teach the rookies how to do their "trade" and handle the most important parts of their team. Lastly, every year each individual build team (Ex. Acquisition, shooting, drivetrain, scaling) have their own leader, who is the representative for meetings during build season, and has the biggest part in designing their teams system.

[Collin Stiers]

we have a student president, a student head engineer and a student project manager who form the "top 3" of our team. The team is then broken into sub teams each with a student captain and primary mentor for those sub teams.

We then have a committee made of the student leaders who make decisions. This "Technical Steering committee" contains the top 3, plus all sub-team captains. The committee makes most team decisions. Technically each person on the committee gets one vote and majority rules, however usually the committee doesn't actually vote, we discuss and then are able to reach a consensus. The teams head mentor and all of the subteam mentors also are part of the committee in a primarily advisory role.

[cscottm]

Team 2502 has four captains, Two Business, and Two Engineering, We also have a variety of lead positions, such as marketing, fundraising, outreach, safety, strategy, CAD, programming, electrical and pneumatic, and awards.

We have tried many different systems, and they seem to change every year.

[Jcarbon]

We have three student captains, who do a lot of the organization, planning, and general leadership of the team, and an outreach director. First, candidates for these positions submit resumes to the mentors, who choose all the qualified candidates. Then, the students vote to make the final decision.

During the build season, we have four engineering subteams (Controls, Chassis, Above Chassis, Fabrication) and each subteam has a team leader, responsible for coordinating meetings, planning schedules, etc., and a head engineer, responsible for overseeing engineering and integrating systems. All the head engineers and team leaders meet together regularly throughout the build season as the systems team.

The system is pretty complicated, but it works well, and it gives a lot of different students opportunities to take leadership responsibilities.

[Lili_1868]

In our team we have 4 captains: the mechanical captain, the programming captain, the business captain, and the marketing and outreach captain. Within each subteam we have directors, so for example, prototyping director (mechanical), autonomous director (programming) and awards director (business). During the build season the work is split up into different projects, and each has a student lead, but they don't have to be a director or captain. I think that this structure is pretty effective, we have 111 students in our team.

[bmoore]

Originally Posted by cscottm

Team 2502 has four captains, Two Business, and Two Engineering, We also have a variety of lead positions, such as marketing, fundraising, outreach, safety, strategy, CAD, programming, electrical and pneumatic, and awards.

We have tried many different systems, and they seem to change every year.

I am also from 2502. We are currently working on a team handbook that will contain descriptions and organizational charts of both student leadership roles and mentor leadership roles. Once that has been completed I will put it in this thread.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by orangelight

Pages 6-18 from here
It works out pretty well for our 60 person team

This is a great team resource. Thanks for sharing.
We have something similar but not quite as detailed as yours...probably because we dont have 60 members in our program.

[5113sean]

Our team is actually pretty structured but it also works off natural leadership. Over the summer, everyone gets to know each other and we complete some small projects, so by pre-season, we are pretty much ready to vote on leadership. We formally vote on president (this past year resulted in a tie, leading to two co-presidents, or, as was theme, a king and a queen), a marketing lead, a mechanical lead, a software lead, and an integration and safety lead. Any ties or near ties result in shared positions.

In the beginning of the year, new students are encouraged to build defenses to learn about tools and safety.

Mechanical is divided into subteams which depend on the game each year. This year, we had a chassis team, an arm team, and a shooter team. Each subteam has an informal leader.

Software is based on skill so those with more skill generally teach the new students and therefore have more code to write.

Electrical has a lead, but generally the group is small so the don't necessarily need subgroups.

Integration is split into integration and safety. Integration has a secretary and a leader for each award application. There are also ambassadors from integration that communicate back and forth between the other groups. Safety is headed by the safety captain.

Marketing is broken up by projects. Generally, the person who came up with the idea is the head of the project unless they feel more comfortable with someone else in charge. There is also a head for communication with the school board and our sponsors.

A lot of our positions overlap (for example, one person would take the responsibility for multiple award applications), but it seems to work. There's a lot less confusion overall and we were able to build a pretty darn good bot this year.

[guniv]

Overall, the team structure is mentors, over the team captain, over the student leaders. We have three departments, which is purely organizational and does not have a leader over them. Inside of the departments are our subteams which DO have leaders. We have departments because the students and leaders often help with the other subteams inside that dept's tasks (ex. HR lead will help Finance contact sponsors). We refer to student leaders + mentors as our "executive board" or team. Here is an easy easy way to understand our structure - a fancy image!

Engineering Design - Mechanical, Electrical, Programming, Game Strategy
These are all self-explanatory.
Branding Design - Communications, Products
Communications does website, social media, helps with awards. Products designs shirts, banners, costumes, pit, etc.
Business Relations - Finance, Human Resources
Finance raises and does some managing of funds (mostly mentors for latter). HR helps build relations in the team by making sure everyone has something to do, and also helps build relations with other teams.

As you can see, there are four engineering leaders and four non-engineering, and the Team Captain makes the final odd vote. This is a good, healthy balance for the team in making decisions.

To answer the rest of OP's specific questions: we've discussed it many times as a team, and we stick to having one team captain for a variety of reasons. One is that there needs to be total accountability and we can't have the captains contradicting each other or any type of confusion on that front. Another is the balance I discussed before, and frankly, it is already sometimes hard to find people to fill all leadership positions anyways and adding another wouldn't help.

Our team has about 40-45 students.

There are a lot of teams in here with "dynamic," changing structures and a crazy amount of leadership roles. Our team made a specific decision two years ago to set our roles concretely, and every leadership position has a specific role and contributes to a healthy team balance. We also think it gives students a goal to work towards - students can show initiative in specific teams to show they want to earn that leadership position (which is elected by the earlier student leaders). Even though this structure was developed sort of closed-door with two students and a mentor and enforced immediately, our team has really grown to it and really believes in it. At our Business Summit we hold for teams, one of the biggest things we emphasize is that having a strong organization structure can make for a strong team.

Happy to answer any questions about our structure.

[Gravity]

Just a general overview of our team's structure with an org chart provided below.

General Statistics:
Amount of students: 38
Years as an FRC Team: 1
Male Students: 31
Female Students: 7

Structural Information
As this was our rookie year we continually updated our structure to meet certain needs throughout the season. We also started the team in late October, which made it a hassle to create a robust team structure before the start of the build season.

Leadership
This year our leadership division was comprised of two presidents, one prominently build and the other prominently business. The presidents were in charge of maintaining the leadership team and interfacing with the mentors. Just below them in the hierarchy was the technical and business directors. The directors were in charge of their corresponding subdivisions which will be listed below.

Technical Divisions

• Build

  Responsible for fabrication of the robot, submitting part requests to the finance lead and maintaining the team shop.

• Programming

  Responsible for the programming functions of team robots.

• CAD

  Oversees design operations and creates drawings for the build team to construct.

• Game Strategy

  Collaborates with the scouting team on game strategy and game mechanics. They are required to submit driver preferences to the programming lead and train potential drivers for the season.

• Scouting

  Responsible for maintaining the scouting team and creating visualizations from competition data.

• Safety

  Responsible for the individual member certification of shop tools. They must maintain a safe environment during the season.

Non-Technical/Business Divisions

• Marketing

  Responsible for social media and team design operations (e.g. logo design, merchandise, banners, etc.).
  

• Website

  Maintains the website content and team databases, and works closely with the marketing lead.
  

• Finance

  Responsible for managing the income and expenses of the team, and procurement.
  

• Outreach

  Responsible for maintaining and improving the team’s presence in the community by coordinating volunteer opportunities, robot demonstrations and team-led events.
  

• Scribe

  Responsible for taking minutes during meetings and updating leads on action items.
  

That pretty much wraps it up, we are going to be publishing complete role descriptions by the end of next year so that upcoming members know what they are getting into.

Feel free to pm me any questions about our team.

[BumblingBuilder]

2169 is currently going through a large restructuring of leadership roles. Our team has undergone multiple restructurings over the last four years, but the current one will be the biggest, at least from a student standpoint rather than a mentor/coach one.

For the last two years, however, we kept a similar leadership structure of:
3 captains (seniors, ideally from different department backgrounds)
3 Mechanical heads
1 Electrical head
1-2 Programming head(s)
1 CAD head
1 Strategy head
1 Business/Marketing head
1 Chairmans head
1 PR head
1 Media head
1 Spirit head
(Occasionally one person would fulfill multiple positions)

However, with the closing of the 2016 season, we added four new captain roles (the original three captain roles being renamed as FRC Captains) to more thoroughly oversee the programs we run and mentor in our school district:
Jr FLL Captain
FLL Captain
VEX Captain (our Middle School in-house program)
FTC Captain

The head positions for next year have yet to be determined by our mentors and captains, and the application for such positions were opened up to student input on new ideas for positions that could help further the goals of our team, so more new positions may very well be added soon.

This structure has generally been successful, but we're always looking for new skillsets people bring to the table and how they can be used in our team, and if necessary, make them a department to focus on a skillset we deem important to the team.

We have around 40 kids in FRC, but around 80 in Prior Lake High School robotics (FTC is treated as somewhat of a JV program), and our FTC kids are given opportunities to be trained in on FRC departments later in the school year and during the summer.

[abigailthefox]

We have 1-2 captains who oversee everything. They handle a lot of the logistical and higher-up stuff, and report directly to mentors. (1-2 because it varies from year to year. You can run with or without a co-captain.)

Beneath that, we have sub teams run by leads. Each lead has control over their own sub team except the safety lead. The safety lead does not have a team, she oversees activity by other sub teams, such as mechanical, and enforces safety rules (oftentimes the safety lead will work on another team, such as mechanical, and perform their safety duties alongside that).

The other sub teams are run by a lead, who is nominated and elected by team members in the spring before the season. Leads must be at least second-year members, and are elected before new recruits join for the upcoming season.

Admittedly, this system has failed for us. Our programming lead essentially abdicated this year, and the bulk of the programming duties were accepted by yours truly (who was not a programmer at any point prior to this). It can also create tensions among people who thought they deserved the position more than the person who got it (but that can happen in any kind of student election).

However, overall I would say we have had success. The biggest struggle is the uneven distribution of team members. If we have 20 people on mechanical, and 4 on programming, we begin to struggle with who will be able to accept lead positions.

[LCJ]

We don't have a very structured management/leadership structure.
Instead our team allows anyone to step up during the season and take initiative to be an informal "leader" of a sub-system/team.

Other than the sub-team leads we don't have captains or a president.

While it may seem like this will cause confusion and issues with coming up with decisions (which we definitely had some of), this open structure makes the leaders who step up accountable and more driven.

Many of the leaders are very active in the off-season and take up a leadership role while preparing the team for the season. This leads to a smooth transition into the season as the newer students see what makes some students qualified to be leaders.