Taking the plunge. . .

[Brandon Holley]

Originally Posted by dellagd

Its alot harder I believe with a smaller team. For example, if you have 100 members, everyone coming in twice a week may be perfectly fine to produce a great robot, but the same does NOT go for a 20 person team (Unfortunately).

I believe your notion of "more bodies = better robot" is simply not true. Many very successful teams each year make do with relatively smaller teams. A 100 person team is much more difficult to manage than a smaller team because engaging 100 people is just that much harder.

Originally Posted by dellagd

You have to put in the time to accomplish your task, and I think when people start Wanting to come in and work all the time, you can have a great team. A half effort on time will produce a half as good robot.

Now I can get behind this statement.

What really drives strong teams is the culture (this is true for strong companies as well). If the culture is there to allow people to innovate, learn, grow and FAIL along the way while striving for excellence at every opportunity, the rest will take care of itself. The team will grow in size because that passion will infect the team members who will spread it to their friends who will spread it to their friends, etc. Establishing this culture is something every company in the world tries to do and many of them fail to remotely achieve.

Originally Posted by dellagd

Motivation of other people is a hard thing to do.

You've just nailed one of the strongest themes of a professional career, motivation. Excellent managers are ones that can ignite passion in their employees. This skill is very hard to find in people, however I have seen many people with this skill involved in FIRST.

-Brando

[SarahBeth]

We're in the process of change ourselves.

This is the first year that 157 has gone from a build season only team to a full year team. We're definitely having our growing pains, but its something that the kids have wanted for a long time and they're beyond excited that this is happening. We right now are running into the challenge that our school is going under construction so we're getting pushed out of our build space and into a smaller space - so the fact that we've got time right now to be organized and know what we have and what we have to move (everything) after build season is a giant help. We couldn't have done this with 2 weeks between build season and when we need to be out of our space.

Anyway - we know this year is a build year and we'll see what happens, but we don't see us going anywhere but up. Its really gratifying seeing our students take charge with just a little bit of guidance, not be afraid to share their ideas and want to be leaders. They're super excited about the outreach too and getting our team known into our community, which is awesome.

[Siri]

This is a good question, as right now we're fighting to stay "plunged" with nor permanate space in which to work. Our transition to plunge-ness was also split into 2 phases, though I split them into technical and student leadership rather than technical and non-technical.

We started in 2005 as a very small, back-of-the-classroom, only-during-build-season team with hand-selected students, mostly upperclassmen. Most of us tended to take a lot of leadership naturally, because the teacher only selected those that did. After a teachers' strike separated us from the school during the 2008 season, we stopped the hand-selection and upperclassmen preference. This was in part because we basically didn't recruit in the chaos and in part because we did absolutely terribly in 2008.

The survivors were determined to fix it in 2009, and we took our technical "plunge". This was mostly on the part of our lead engineering mentor with a few remaining student veterans. This small scale worked alright for a while, but as the team started to grow (without the historical vetting process), the student population got younger, less experienced and less assertive, and mentors started to play a bigger role. We recognized this, and in 2011 we took the organizational "plunge" to restructure and expand from a team designed for selected alpha upperclassmen to one that would be better at giving everyone opportunity and encouragement to grow. We're still plunging on that one (that's a good thing, right?) as our team continues to get younger with less technical background.