Keeping an Eye on the Big Picture

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by themitchshow

Once a week we gather our team together and each sub group gives a 1-2 minute presentation

Once a week didn't work for us when we tried it. There was so much progress in a week things were already out of hand.

Originally Posted by weberr

We use QFD, or quality function deployment, to boil down what is the necessary attributes & scoring opportunities versus the robot characteristics.

That's great for design, and for guiding design changes/decisions when things don't go well. But that's the design phase. Our "problem" is in the fabrication phase.

The real issue is that we have the concept and basic design set, but the details - precise dimensions for example - are determined empirically during fabrication. What we end up with is several subsystems that don't work well together, and design decisions from one sub-team that absolutely preclude many possible solutions for another sub-team's problems.

On the other hand, running everything through one person seems like an awful lot of work for that one person. My condolences Madison.

Our idea is to have a small committee of mentors and students take on the 'overseer' role. This way one 'entity' really knows what is really going on and can (hopefully) see and spot conflicts, while not being terribly overwhelming for one person.

We also see a far greater role for CAD. In the past, they were documenting designs after the fact. This year, if I see a CAD kid with a ruler in their hands, I'll know we failed. I hope to see a final design in CAD before the first piece of metal is cut. This gives me the most worry: I don't know if we are disciplined enough to do that.

I'll let you know if it works.