Dualistic Team

[Kusha]

1745 keeps a group system. I'm apart of Electrical/Programming/Cad
Then there is
ARM group
Chassis group
Chairmans group

It helps with organizing, but when things start to become tense between the groups it isn't a good sign. For example, sometimes the chassis/arm group thinks they're better than everyone. Elections start to become biased etc. So be sure to keep everyone happy/equal. Every meeting starts off with who has done what so no one is left in the cold.
This is all from a student stand point.

[KathieK]

Most of the teams I work with are split like this.

Be sure your "business side" mentors join NEMO! www.firstnemo.org

[Josh Fox]

During my time on Team RUSH we typically had students associated with the "business" and "build' teams, but by no means were those lines always drawn clearly.

To avoid the disconnect between the teams some of you mentioned, we held weekly design reviews on a designated day where each sub-team, all business and build teams included, would put together a presentation to get the entire team up to speed on what that team had accomplished the previous week and progress on short-term and long-term goals.

[Katie_UPS]

It sounds like large teams can handle this pretty effectively. UPS is a small team (12 students), and so our "business side" is one student. There are "robot side" people who help her out when they can, but its mostly her doing a lot of the award writing, PR, grant writing, etc. Next year, she'll be gone. I speculate that we won't have a defined "Business" side as much as we'll have kids doing their "build" duties as well as writing chairmans, organizing events, etc.

UPS, however, has always been small and never has had more than two full-time students on the "business" side of things...

[Jared Russell]

Add us to the list of teams that do this. We actually do it physically - we have a classroom/computer room connected to a small shop with large windows in between. The manufacturing and prototyping folks spend most of their time in the shop, while the CAD, animation, web, media, and business teams spend most of their time in the classroom.

Just make sure that one half doesn't forget the other exists! (Large bay windows and communal team dinners help to alleviate this )