Keeping an Eye on the Big Picture

[Madison]

Originally Posted by DonRotolo

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

Appreciated. It's my own fault, of course. I am terrible and delegating tasks I think I can handle myself.

For 2014, there are a few students who are up to speed on CAD and have gained a lot of experience with design via past FRC seasons, running FTC teams and summer internships. If I am not the only one with access to and understanding of the CAD model, hopefully that means I'm not the only one who can answer questions about fit and function. Also, for the first time in more than a decade, I don't have a laptop. That means that I'll have to be more diligent about sharing the CAD data in the cloud so that I can pull it down at our lab.

Years ago, when I had more energy and more free time, I was able to prepare work packets in advance of each meeting that laid out, in detail, what needed to get done / which materials to use / what requirements to meet / etc. These days, I do that on the fly. That doesn't work as well.

I know there are lots of different methodologies for running FRC teams and they each have their merits. In my experience, though, most teams that build successful robots year after year have one person (or maybe a small handful) making decisions about how things will go together.