[FRC Blog] Awards Section of FRC Administrative Manual Posted

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by MrBydlon

I don't where I fall on the "Chairman's Video" discussion so I'm going to comment on something I noticed in the Awards Section.

The Entrepreneurship Award is VERY different. I've heard of teams submitting 50+ page Business Plans. I understand that that is maybe necessary given a team's history but that would be extremely hard to judge. Restricting the characters and providing a pretty strict format will make it easier.

But holy cow(s) did the Business Plan portion change!!

I'm actually not sure if it did, and since I'm no longer a student, I can't check.

The manual states:

A formal business plan is submitted through STIMS at (https://my.usfirst.org/stims/site.lasso).

Then there's a bolded and udnerlined, "Business Plan Template"(which I believe was a hyperlink to a template last year) but then goes on to say that an executive summary must be filled out; is what's referred to as the "executive summary" replacing the business plan? It doesn't reference having to upload a PDF or anything.

[MechEng83]

I made my award submitters log in to STIMS with me on November 14th to poke around and make sure they understood what was needed for the submissions (we had an issue last year with the submitters for one of the awards logging in the 2nd to last day and then scrambling...)

We were shocked to see the massive amount of changes to the business plan submission process. My understanding is that last year, it was just uploading of a document. This year, it's a lot of individual sections with maximum character limits. While I wish this was released/made public much earlier in the season (we pretty much develop our business plan at the beginning of the year), I understand that this makes the submissions much easier to compare and judge. We're one of those 50+ page business plan teams. We'll pare it down and make it fit the new format.

I think the itemized list for the executive summary for chairman's is new too, rather than a free form maximum character space.

Of course, as a mentor, I don't have access to these screens, so I'm going off memory.

[MrBydlon]

Originally Posted by DevenStonow

Then there's a bolded and udnerlined, "Business Plan Template"(which I believe was a hyperlink to a template last year) but then goes on to say that an executive summary must be filled out; is what's referred to as the "executive summary" replacing the business plan? It doesn't reference having to upload a PDF or anything.

I was confused as well. However, I had a current student log in and we checked it out. There is no document upload spot. It's just the 8 different 1600 character sections. There are also 4 different picture uploads.

I agree with MechEng83. I would have liked to have known this information in advance but it's ok. We still have about 2 months.

Also, the Chairman's Executive Summary has changed. There are now 12 sections. I noticed a marked emphasis on how FRC teams build up other FIRST teams in the questions. It makes sense, we heard that kind of feedback last year at our presentation.