paper: Cyber Blue - Design Review Planning

[Chris Fultz]

Thread created automatically to discuss a document in CD-Media.

Cyber Blue - Design Review Planning by Chris Fultz

[Chris Fultz]

Design Reviews are an important part of the design and development process. FIRST teams can benefit from having an extra set of eyes looking at the strategy and design to offer new ideas or perspecives.

This document provides the basic steps to organize a develop and organize a review and includes a sample agenda to use.

This process has evolved over several years and the agenda and plan changes slightly each year as we adjust and adapt to input from the students and the review panel.

Having a review with your sponsors is a great way to give them the details of what you are learning and doing, and involves them in your design process.

[Kims Robot]

AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME.... sorry I ran out of breath or would have said it a million more times.

I was going to say "you are my hero", but I guess you already were...
I've been at COMPANIES that don't do this as well as your team does

What I would love to see as a followup (perhaps during competition season, or after...) is if you would be willing to post your actual review package from this year. Seeing what kind of detail and information is provided could be immensely helpful.

And I guess this concept is sort of similar to what Project Lead the Way does with their Capstone design course... they bring in engineers to actually review the design at a few stages. Obviously the 6 weeks is so compressed you probably don't get more than one review in, but this really makes so much sense, and teams can stand to gain so much from it. I think some teams are getting better at doing internal design review meetings, but I love the idea of getting sponsoring engineers involved... and will definitely borrow this idea with my next team......... :-D

[mathking]

Chris, thanks for posting this. It is a very good read and something my team needs to be better at. I am going to try to use something like this next year.

As a side note, teams 3324 and 4269 hosted some sessions early in the build season where Columbus area teams shared their ideas about strategy and capabilities. It was valuable for us to have other people ask questions about our strategy decisions and assumptions and resulted in some changes to our formal strategy document. (Which guides our design decisions.) Now I am thinking that maybe a similar evening at the end of week 3 or start of week 4 might not be a bad idea.

[Chris Fultz]

Week 5 is starting - this is a great time in your program schedule to pause, look back at your original design goals and robot objectives, and then see where you are against those objectives.

If you can hold a Design Review and bring in an outside / independent group to revies, you can get a valuable perspective as well as learn from the experience of the review.

[mathking]

Chris, thanks again for posting this. I will strongly second the value of such an assessment. I teach a class that has students from 1014 and 3324 in it. Last week in class, some of the 3324 students were asking questions about our prototype robot (since it was sitting out in the classroom) and our design hierarchy. In explaining it to them, a couple of things we probably should have thought about but had not became apparent. At least one lead to a good design change for us.