Growing Team

[Tom I]

Team 811 is actually facing a similar situation, we've almost doubled our numbers from previous years, with now more than 50 members, all of whom are extremely active and show up almost every meeting with only a couple exceptions. The good news is this is our 11th year, and we have a pretty good system in place.

Best advice would be to set up a central heirarchy and subteam breakdown. My team has 4 "robot focused" subteams: Mechanical, Programming, Wiring, and GOD Squad (Governance, Organization, and Drivers). We also have non-robot focused, but equally important subteams: Marketing, 3D, CAD, and Website.
The subteams each have 1 or 2 leads depending on size, who report to the team leads. Together, these leads do the majority of the organization, as the team is completely student run.

After you have some sort of organizational breakdown, set up a routine for staying on track. Before each meeting, the subteam leads report to the leads of what they hope to get done, and there's a schedule to keep everyone on the same timeline. With a routine order, things will fall into place. But don't be discouraged if things are rocky at first, best thing is to learn from mistakes. good luck!

[hat_ios]

Team 610 has experienced a similar issue. Last season, we had roughly 40 members. This season, there are 70 team applications that were filled out. In order to find jobs for so many people, we tried splitting the team into many different sub-sections. We have divided robot building into 5 categories: CAD, mobility (drivetrain), function (manipulator), energy systems (electrical and pneumatics), and programming. We also have not robot building divisions including strategy, animation, website and business department. Each of the divisions have a student lead, as well as teacher mentor.

We also find that it is a good idea to have a 3-4 day a week minimum for students to participate. We try to have the students day availability beforehand, and this allows us to: A) not have too many students in the lab. B) So that there are jobs for everyone. Depending in your space restrictions, it may be a good idea to tell students to only come at a certain date or time, or find an additional space to work.

Depending on the regionals that you will be attending, if may be a good idea to have a "travelling team". If you are attending a "home regional", it would be a good idea to allow all students to attend. If you are travelling out of town/city, it would be a good idea to limit the number of students that can attend. If you tell the students beforehand about the travelling regional, and that you are going to have to select students, it adds a good incentive for them to work hard.

[michaela.settle]

Thank you all so much! I'm going to share all of these with our coach.

[VKP]

Team 1899 has had as many as 70 members at once on the team, but we are able to make sure everyone has a job to do by, as others have said before me, crating team subdivisions.

We have a dedicated Media team (which focuses on photography and videotaping during meetings and at events), a dedicated programming team, a dedicated web team, and a LARGE PR team.

If you were to make one subdivision of your team, I would make a PR/FundRaising team first. Having a team of people who know all the information about grants, public relations, and money is really beneficial to team organization

[Hallry]

Originally Posted by VKP

We have a dedicated Media team (which focuses on photography and videotaping during meetings and at events),...a dedicated web team, and a LARGE PR team.

Very wise idea, it's always good to be present in your community and get as much P.R. as possible.

I was able to get a picture of our division and sub-division chart as I described in a post above, it should be shown below:



As you can see, each of the four divisions has four sub-divisions. Each division and sub-division is lead by a student, with two C.E.O.'s (one from each of the two school's in our district) above the four division leaders.

I hope this helps! Please feel free to ask if you have any other questions. =)

[MrMurf]

For teams that do sub divisions, do you allow students to be in more than one group so they can experience different aspects of engineering and non engineering? What about groups who seem to have specific lifespans? Ex: What does the chassis team do once the chassis is complete?

[Hallry]

Originally Posted by MrMurf

For teams that do sub divisions, do you allow students to be in more than one group so they can experience different aspects of engineering and non engineering?

Most of our engineering groups only do their engineering-related tasks, but recently we've had some non-engineering groups want to learn how to do other things, which they are allowed to do after their own work is done.

Originally Posted by MrMurf

What about groups who seem to have specific lifespans? Ex: What does the chassis team do once the chassis is complete?

If one group doesn't have work, they usually do miscellaneous work such as button-making, or any task that needs to get done. However, there constant seems to be work, and our chassis team is usually always busy either creating the robot's chassis, creating our test/practice bot's chassis, or fixing one of the two. Our idlers never seem to like to stay in one place for long =P

[EricH]

If a group doesn't have work to do, but another group is running into an issue, you can do a "Tiger Team" with the finished group to come up with alternative solutions. I've been on those more than once when either there was an issue or we hadn't done a detail design due to priorities. Or get some of them to do non-engineering stuff like scouting.