The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Adam Freeman]

Originally Posted by topgun

For me, this just begs the question, what is your team doing differently from 99% of the other teams that you can consistently create elite-level robots in 45 days with that kind of build schedule? Is it the amount of mentors with experience, project management, CAD, attitude, students, etc...? Can you elicit some principles that would be concrete takeaways for other teams following this thread.

Honestly, I can't really explain it outside of mentor experience. We have an incredible Chief Engineer (Jim Meyer - 13 years in FIRST), who I would argue is the best in all of FIRST.

Many teams have asked how we do it....and we've tried to adapt the principles of many other great teams (148, 1114, etc...).

It's definitely not CAD experience. We do 95% of all our work in 2D AutoCAD.

I doubt it's project management, we rarely finish on time.
Since I've joined the team:

-2005: Competition robot did not drive on carpet until first competition.
-2006: Robot was a disaster. Did not have Jim full time this year.
-2007: Robot was finished 2 weeks early. Good robot. Could have done more, but was weary after 2006.
-2008: Complete design change on the arm prior to first competition.
-2009: Complete re-design during un-bag time before first competition.
-2010: Robot was done early. Added ball-magnet before first competition. Added climber throughout competition season.
-2011: Robot was finished early. Mini-bot development and deployment was finished week of first competition. Terrible code issued at first competition.
-2012: Best machine we have ever built. Robot was done early. No major issues throughout competition season.
-2013: Robot not finished when bagged. Major work to get functional before first competition. Climber developed and added throughout competition season.

So my guess would be mentor experience, attitude, and students. We expect that we will be able to create a World Class competition robot. We instill that expectation in our students. We devote as much time as possible (as mentioned before), given work and family requirements.

The other thing we have is almost instant access to parts and materials. We are very fortunate to have a build facility that we can make virtually any part that we would design for our robot. That allows us the opportunity to make design changes quickly.

I'm not sure I would recommend our design process or project management style to anyone else. It works for us....and we're willing to share it, but I don't think it is the "best" process bt any measure.