Experienced Teams' Advice

[Jengles]

This year was my team's rookie year. We had 12 kids come out for the team, and we won Rookie Allstar and will be traveling to St. Louis. We have had almost enough interest from other students where we plan on having more than three times the size of our team for next year. I was the only captain of the team, and the only form of organization was loosely put together subsystems. (like programming, electrical, and hardware which was divided into more sub levels). My question is to the larger more veteran teams. How do your teams implement organization, where everybody gets to work where they want but not everybody is working at the same job?

[Saberbot]

Wow, I was just thinking about starting a thread like this. We're in a pretty similar boat. We have officers and organization, but I feel like it probably won't be able to scale to our predicted size for next year without some modification.

P.S. Congrats on Rookie All-Star! See you at Champs

[EricH]

Subteams is actually a pretty good way to keep things organized. However, you have to use some caution when putting people on them; put someone who just wants to program onto mechanical and look out!

What you can do is have everyone list their top two-three subteams. If you have too many in one, you can bump a few to their second one which has fewer.

Suggested subteam breakdown: Mechanical (which includes Drivetrain and Scoring Device subteams), Electrical, Programming, Everything Else. It should be noted that Everything Else is your marketing, fundraising, and such-like groups, which will presumably be rather small for a while. They can split out later as you grow. The most critical subteams on the list? Drivetrain and Everything Else.

You'll also need to talk between subteams quite often. In fact, you should probably go as a full team until after Week 1 of build, to make sure that everyone's on the same page with what's happening. Every subteam needs to talk to every other subteam that interfaces with them quite regularly.

[Drivencrazy]

First of all one of the most important things you can do is work during the off-season to get your team organized. If you have 40 people show up to kickoff next January with relatively no idea what is going on you will most likely have chaos on your hands. I suggest having regular meetings over the summer to develop skills and to help kids find out what the like and don't like. Then have your team leadership work with some of the student leaders (not necessarily elected leaders but students who took initiative this year) to develop a team organizational plan. The Simbots have a great workshop on this found here.

After the students learn about all of the different sub-teams let them sign up for sub-teams they would like to be apart of. I would let them sign up for as many as they are interested in and once the work starts they will settle into a couple they really enjoy. If you find you have an immense imbalance in your sub-teams, you can ask students if they would be willing to work on teams that need help. The most important thing is to make sure everyone is enjoying what they are working on. If they don't they won't be getting the most out of their FIRST experience and more likely than not your team will be getting less than optimal results.

As far as your specific team is concerned I know nothing about you mentor base but I would also suggest having a specific mentor that either leads or can help the sub-team in case they run into any issues. This will keep any one mentor from becoming overwhelmed. Along with mentors it may be helpful depending on the makeup of your team to have student leads in all of these groups. It helps individuals develop leadership skills and gives the sub-team someone to look to for direction. This student lead and mentor should work very closely in order to make sure each sub-team is accomplishing its goals and that those goals are in line with the overall team goals.

These are just general suggestions and if you have any questions feel free to PM me or just post back here.

[LeelandS]

Eric pretty much got it.

We have about 6 or 7 major (meaning each student is assigned to one primarily) subteams a year. Promotions (the equivalent of most team's marketing teams), software, electrical, and about 4 mechanical teams, divided into each aspect of the physical robot; typically drives, acquisition, elevation/storage/body and usually a special team for what's game-specific.

When kids submit applications for their teams, they number three of these teams in order of most interest. Students are usually placed in the team they sign up, but if team leadership feels otherwise, they aren't. For example, when I signed up for software my Sophomore year and was placed on a mechanical team, I was told it was to expand my horizons. Which it did. So things like that may occur, if you feel it's necessary.

Most importantly, make sure everyone is OK with their assignment. Unhappy students are unproductive workers. Also, don't pair up 2+ people who you think can't work together on the same subteam (not for reasons of dislike, but
for reasons of lack of focus).

I hope this helps, feel free to ask if you need any help.
-Leeland

[BJC]

We have 40 students and use the subteam method as well.

This year we broke into:
-turret, gun, and hood
-Chassis and internal collector
-Bridge handler and external collector
-bridge balancer "stinger"
-Website
-Chairman's Award
-janitorial services

Our system for putting people in groups is to write the groups up on the whiteboard and allow the students to put their name under the group that they most want to work in. Then the mentors will later switch the names around to spread around the more experienced students so there is not one "awesome" group with all the seniors and one lowly group of all freshmen. These groups are then headed by either one or two mentors who control their "minions." Every though we all work in the same shop, in order to maintain continuity between groups at the end of every meeting all the groups meet back together in the confrence room to discuss/ show what they did today and they're goals for the near and distant future. For us this is key to the success our subgroup system.

Regards, Bryan

[Michael Corsetto]

Go here -> http://www.simbotics.org/resources/workshops

Simbotics have put together an incredible amount of resources for team organization and technical advice for certain sub-teams. Start reading the "Running a Team" document and apply it to your situation! This is my ninth season in FRC and I go back to these documents all the time for advice on team leadership.

They even have an iPhone app!

Thanks 1114!

-Mike

[Jengles]

When everybody writes down their preferred sub levels, how do you ever fill the position of marketing and fundraising? I ended up taking over both those jobs this year, and I doubt anybody would want to do those. Do these jobs get assigned to the newer members (like freshmen), and then with time they work themselves up to more experience jobs?

[Wayne TenBrink]

Subteams are definitely the way to go.

Try to keep some low level of activity going through the summer (picnic, off-season event, etc.) and be prepared to do your subteam training in the fall, before kickoff.

Don't go overboard on the robot next year. A lot of second year teams (like ours) think they are seasoned experts and try to bite off more than they can chew (technically). Keep it simple and focus on building the team.

Congratulations on the rookie all-star!

[BJC]

On our team fundraising (recruiting sponsors) is done during the offseason and the entire team is involved. During the season is far to late to begin gathering money.

[jyh947]

Team 3322 has an engineering side and a business side due to the fact that we have 46 students. Each side of the team has a co-captain, while there is one captain overall (me).

In the engineering side, we have the following sub-teams:
Drive-train
Effector (bridge tipper, shooter, bridge balancer)
Programming - LabView
Programming - C++
Electrical

In the business side, we have the following sub-teams:
Media/PR (Pit design, Chairman's, WFA)
Website

[Walter Deitzler]

How do the sub-teams make the whole robot compatible? Say the shooter/lifter needed X amount of space, and the bridge lowering mechanism need to use some of the area that the shooter/lifter space is using. When it is all done with and you have two mechanism that need valuable space on your robot, which gets presidence? These are some issues that 3397 ran into this season, so this thread is very helpful for us too.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by Jengles

When everybody writes down their preferred sub levels, how do you ever fill the position of marketing and fundraising? I ended up taking over both those jobs this year, and I doubt anybody would want to do those. Do these jobs get assigned to the newer members (like freshmen), and then with time they work themselves up to more experience jobs?

You'll be surprised how many people love doing this kind of thing, whether or not they want to be engineers. I'm one of them. We pick one person to lead the fundraising with the fundraising mentor, and that person works with teammates to make presentations, write letters, and scout out businesses that could potentially sponsor us.

Encourage everyone to work on fundraising and PR. It makes you appreciate the competition more than just coming in to build the robot.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by LedLover96

How do the sub-teams make the whole robot compatible? Say the shooter/lifter needed X amount of space, and the bridge lowering mechanism need to use some of the area that the shooter/lifter space is using. When it is all done with and you have two mechanism that need valuable space on your robot, which gets presidence? These are some issues that 3397 ran into this season, so this thread is very helpful for us too.

This is part of what I was talking about with the subteams work together on the whole concept/design, then every time it looks like there's a conflict of space or a tough interface, both subteams involved get together and talk it out until a solution is found.

In this case, as soon as someone figured out the problem, you should have started talking. Could the brige mechanism be moved? What about the shooter/lifter? Could you link them somehow? Or redesign one to avoid the other? All sorts of options if both subteams talk it over.

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by Drivencrazy

If you have 40 people show up to kickoff next January with relatively no idea what is going on you will most likely have chaos on your hands.

Meet maybe 6-10 times between start of school and mid-December, and have people actually build a robot. That way, everyone learns the exact skills they need for Build Season, so after Kickoff and Design Week, you can get to work without having to teach everyone how to (name a task).

Design Week is written about many times on CD, do some searching to get an idea on how to spend your first week after Kickoff.

If the Design is done well (and that's not easy) you end up with many "components" that are parts of an "Assembly" which makes up a subsystem (like Drivetrain, manipulator, control system, etc.).

If each team member gets a piece of paper with the design specs for a Component, you send them off to go fabricate it, and they are busy until they are done. It takes someone who can keep track of a million details, make sure people are working and not goofing off, that the time & weight budget aren't slipping, and more (known as a Project manager).

So the trick is to keep handing out papers that tell people what to work on next, to keep them busy. Very hard to do, but if you can pull some of that off, you'll be very pleased with the results.

+1 on Subteams BTW. Electrical also handles Pneumatics.