Biggest Obstacles to Effective Design

[ouellet348]

In a very informal setting, i.e. CD, I wanted to collect some opinions on what teams feel the biggest obstacle to their design process is of the topics below:

• Technical Expertise
• Organized Design Process
• Resources e.g. software, hardware
• Technical Support
• Organizing Data Across Assemblies
• Organizing Data Across Team Members

Feel free to throw out any other issues you have. Thanks for the input.

[Dan Petrovic]

Our biggest obstacle is prioritizing game functions. Part of that comes from being unable to accurately gauge the difficulty of certain functions.

To use Recycle Rush as an example, we vastly underestimated the capabilities of other teams and built a specialist robot because we felt that only "The 1%" would be able to reliably build capped stacks by themselves.

[Michael Hill]

Organizing data across assemblies. I couldn't even tell you how much time I had to spend reintegrating parts with SolidWorks. Too many external references in assemblies causing all sorts of havoc trying to integrate an actual assembly. Combining that with top-down design being so advantageous, it's a nightmare. It got to the point to actually have an assembly that worked well, I had to open some assemblies in a certain order.

[AdamHeard]

Unfortunately for most teams it's people.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Unfortunately for most teams it's people.

Beat me to it. More to the point, I would say "feelings".

[BrennanB]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Unfortunately for most teams it's people.

Especially when they refuse to admit to themselves that they made mistakes, then take responsibility and say "we messed up, our bad"

Do this and you will do much much better. You can't do better if you don't have a way to do it.

[rsisk]

Our problem tends to be going from idea to design. Most of the team have great ideas with no clue how to design them.

We also struggle with the team members that argue "your idea is to difficult to do, so we do it my way" followed by an occurrence of my first issue, idea -> design struggles.

[Newo]

The biggest problem my team faced this past year was over complication. We ended up running very short on time because our complex parts took a long time to machine. I think often something can look really great in the CAD model, but it's worthless if you don't actually have the resources to create it within a reasonable amount of time.

[Kevin Leonard]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Unfortunately for most teams it's people.

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

Beat me to it. More to the point, I would say "feelings".

Originally Posted by BrennanB

Especially when they refuse to admit to themselves that they made mistakes, then take responsibility and say "we messed up, our bad"

Do this and you will do much much better. You can't do better if you don't have a way to do it.

All of this.
If the team buys in to a specific culture and design and goals, you are a thousand times more likely to succeed than if people don't buy in and don't cooperate.

"A [FIRST Team] divided against itself cannot stand."
Paraphrased from Abe Lincoln

[The_ShamWOW88]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Unfortunately for most teams it's people.

I would say more specifically it's personalities and the many strong "opinions" which throw snags into the design process.

[BryceReadyhough]

The biggest challenges my team faced was managing the part files. We ended up bringing a router and a NAS drive to the meetings This way all of the CAD team members could work on the part files. It would be nice if there was a cleaner way to do this as setting up a router and everything before each meeting is kind of clunky.

[Paul Copioli]

For most teams (and most companies) the biggest obstacle is talent. Too often we like to forget that it takes an insane amount of hard work to even have a chance to overcome raw talent.

At the end of the day, some people have it and many people do not.

The challenge for team leaders is identifying talent early and nurturing it.

This is not to say a team should discourage people that may not have the natural talent, but if you have a student(s) on your team that has/have the talent then you have a significant advantage over other teams if you take advantage of it.

[ouellet348]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

Organizing data across assemblies.

There is truth in that external references are the devil.

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Dan Petrovic

Our biggest obstacle is prioritizing game functions. Part of that comes from being unable to accurately gauge the difficulty of certain functions.

Same here, though I wouldn't call it an obstacle so much as a flaw. We have improved slowly over the years in predicting what other teams will do and responding appropriately. For example, we realized that the HP station would be utilized by most of the top end teams, and went for a landfill specialist that could also flip totes and work from the step. However, even on Einstein, the inverted totes and totes on the step didn't become as important as we thought they would. Our biggest flaw this year was in not realizing how much alliance partners will get in your way, and second was not so much a design as an implementation flaw in that we never got our stacks to consistently interlock, requiring too many trips. We did a lot better in practice than on the field, even though we did mimic the layout of the field pretty closely.

[kgargiulo]

Originally Posted by ouellet348

There is truth in that external references are the devil.

More specifically, it is unintended external references that can hurt you. Sometimes the external reference really is your design intent. The CAD program shouldn't make your life hard to recover from the former or enable the latter.

I don't know SW, but Creo lets you control (warn or outright prevent) the creation of external references. Also there is visibility into the references you have created. SW may have similar features, I don't know.

Disclaimer - I work for PTC.