Strategy Sub-Team

[evanperryg]

Originally Posted by IronicDeadBird

I'm reading this to say that only those on the strat team brainstorm ideas is this true?

Robot ideas/strategic design ideas can come from anyone, but actual match strategy is done exclusively by the strategy team members. For the sake of simplicity, I will consider strategic design apart from event strategy. Our strategy "subteam" is students from any tehnical/business subteam that is interested in strategy, understands it well, and can communicate effectively in a scouting meeting. Scouters are any student not in the pit, who aren't presenting chairman's, who have been trained on our scouting app. Here's our hierarchy for the scouting team:

Lead Strategist
         |-------------------------------------------------------------------|
Lead Scout                                                                   |
         |------------------------------------------|                        |
Match Scouters (~20ish)      Qualitative Scouters(3-5)          Pit scouters (1-2)

Lead strategist: Develops match strategy with the drive team. Collects data aggregated by the lead scout, and processes it with Tableau and MS Access. Manages pit scouters, collects information as they see necessary for developing strategy and picklists.Assembles the shift schedule for match scouting before each event.

Lead scout: Develops the match scouting interface, i.e. scouting app or paper sheets. Aggregates data from qualitative scouters and match scouters, to be collected by the lead strategist. Makes sure match scouters and qualitative scouters are focused, comfortable and are attending their shifts.

Match scouters: collect qualitative data using the scouting app. Work 2-3 2 hour shifts per event. Makes sure that the lead scout has collected their data before leaving their shift.

Qualitative scouters: dont have a schedule, but scout for 75-100% of matches out of their own enthusiasm. Collect qualitative data from matches, including notes about what a team did, why they did it, speculation on a team's strategic potential, etc. Extremely important in scouting meetings, as these are the students who see the most matches, and can provide excellent feedback on almost any team.

Pit scouters: collect general technical information on every team at the beginning of the event. They also do not have a predefined schedule, but are called upon by the lead strategist when they are needed. They will be frequently called upon Saturday morning to get last-minute, very specific info needed to make the picklist as strong as possible. Our picklist meetings include the lead mentor, drive team, lead strategist, lead scout, and qualitative scouters.

[connor.worley]

1538 ran a similar model that worked well.

18-20 scouts on rotation collecting match data.

1-2 scout masters on rotation compiling the data in excel / getting relevant numbers for the strategy lead.

1 strategy lead who creates match strategies and relays them to the drive coach.

The drive coach makes sure the strategies are executed properly, but has minimal strategic input. Really takes a lot of pressure off the drive team. We'd go to meet with other drive teams before matches, but our strategy lead would come down as well and usually be the one leading the discussion.

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by connor.worley

18-20 scouts on rotation collecting match data.

1-2 scout masters on rotation compiling the data in excel / getting relevant numbers for the strategy lead.

Somewhere out there, my scouting lead [now co-captain] is salivating at the thought of having that much manpower.

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Somewhere out there, my scouting lead [now co-captain] is salivating at the thought of having that much manpower.

We did it with 8 scouts, 1 onsite scouting app programmer, 1 match strategy manager, and 1 pit scout. We had 3 mentors supporting this, plus the drive coach. We added scouts as we could to relieve the burden, but our minimum crew was highly functional.

[evanperryg]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Somewhere out there, my scouting lead [now co-captain] is salivating at the thought of having that much manpower.

It's a nice benefit of having a large team. Even the best match scouters get tired and sidetracked after a while, so switching them out can make people happier, and data more reliable.

[gblake]

Ask yourself (or the team) who is going to consume the ___ group's outputs (fill in the blank with "strategy subteam" or with any other group's name).

If no one wants, or if no one will use, what that ____ group produces, someone's time is being wasted (or several someones' time). That leads to all sorts of predictable results.

So, if you look through this end of the telescope, no matter how your team has been organized or will be organized, you don't need a strategist until someone says "I need the answer to X, and I think the answer depends on the strategy we are going to use." At that point, and not before, you need an individual or group able to answer that strategic question competently.

Having a gut feeling that "strategy" is a good thing is very different from actually using the results of developing a strategy. Also, what someone needs (because someone else says they need it) is not the same thing as something they will actually use.

In some teams, strategic geniuses and the results they produce would be totally wasted, because no one feels the need to have (someone else's) strategic thinking affect what they are doing. In other teams, a good strategist is considered worth their weight in gold.

I'll bet that if you assign team members to jobs using this sort of thought process, and iterate a few times, you will eventually be happy with the result. You will have people producing the answers or the items that your team is actually going to use to accomplish the things your team wants to do.

Blake
PS: I am a definite believer in translating a selected strategy into requirements, and then turning those requirements into a design. I also know it is a hard thing to do to get a herd of cats to understand the differences between those three things, and actually follow a process that keeps them separate and in-order. However, I think the payoff is worth the investment.

[Kevin Leonard]

Strategy is interesting, because I've seen so many teams run a "Strategy team" successfully in dozens of different ways.
The commonalities are:

• A well-trained scouting team that takes quantitative and qualitative data and puts the data in a format that is easy to interpret.
  
• A smart, strategic drive coach who knows how to make smart, split-second decisions on the field.
  
• An understanding of different factors contributing to alliance make-up and picklisting (consistency, standard deviation, scarcity, differences between quals, quarters, semis, finals, etc.)
  
• An understanding of the different ways to maximize an alliance's potential, or to consistently score at some threshhold.
  
• A team that understands what it takes to win and is willing to take whatever steps it takes (making robot modifications, playing the back-up robot and having your own team sit out, etc.)
  
• And perhaps most importantly, Gracious Professionalism at all times! No alliance can succeed without this, even if they have the best strategy and robots to back it up.

[Michael Hill]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Somewhere out there, my scouting lead [now co-captain] is salivating at the thought of having that much manpower.

Just do what we do...develop a scouting platform and give other teams access to the data. Our team doesn't have nearly enough scouters to do it ourselves, but because we're open with the data and analytics (and the software is decently good quality), we are able to get help from other teams at the regional (coordinated ahead of time).

[Lil' Lavery]

Don't interpret my comment to mean 1712 hasn't managed to scout with more limited manpower. Our finalist run at Chestnut Hill this year was largely powered by our alliance selections. We won the GP Award at the Upper Darby district in part because of how we helped other teams with their pick lists. We often pair up with another team to help gather data.

It was just a statement of jealousy towards the teams with sufficient manpower to do more advanced things with their scouting while not burning out their scouts.

[rick.oliver]

First, develop your game plans, call it your strategy, which describes exactly what you want to accomplish in each phase of the game based on your analysis of the game rules (scoring options, constraints, etc.). Prioritize the strategies and elements within each strategy.

That has always been a full team exercise on teams I've been associated with. The team size has always been less than 50 and greater than 20.

Second, develop design concepts which could deliver your strategy, evaluate (this is the engineering) and define your design basis. Again, mostly a full team exercise.

At this point begin conceptual design, prototyping in groups.

You may need to redefine your strategy throughout the build process as you learn or need to compromise ... refer to your priorities.

Once your design is firm and you've locked on your machine's capabilities, begin to define your scouting needs, strengths and needs for help from an alliance partner.

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by gblake

PS: I am a definite believer in translating a selected strategy into requirements, and then turning those requirements into a design. I also know it is a hard thing to do to get a herd of cats to understand the differences between those three things, and actually follow a process that keeps them separate and in-order. However, I think the payoff is worth the investment.

This explicitly the process we use the first few days of build season. We shout down design ideas the first day!

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

Just do what we do...develop a scouting platform and give other teams access to the data. Our team doesn't have nearly enough scouters to do it ourselves, but because we're open with the data and analytics (and the software is decently good quality), we are able to get help from other teams at the regional (coordinated ahead of time).

Our alternative is to develop a platform that only involves input from the scouts and virtually no data processing on site. Our tablet system is all programmed to do the data analysis on a remote server and then spit out the results. That makes our scouting much less stressful. (Except when the system glitches, but then that's the app programmers' headache.) We have 2 whitepapers up on setting up the system and will prepare another soon.

[Michael Hill]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

Our alternative is to develop a platform that only involves input from the scouts and virtually no data processing on site. Our tablet system is all programmed to do the data analysis on a remote server and then spit out the results. That makes our scouting much less stressful. (Except when the system glitches, but then that's the app programmers' headache.) We have 2 whitepapers up on setting up the system and will prepare another soon.

We do the same...we just take in A LOT of data. We've recorded positions of events since 2012. That's knowing where teams are scoring (with heatmaps), fouls, and defensive efforts. We have 4G tablets and have teams come help us.

Here is the 2013 page: http://innovators3138.org/dash/

Select either Queen City or Crossroads (We did IRI, but I don't see the data there for some reason). Select a match. The teams should load. There are checkboxes next to each of them. Select a team you're interested in and whether you want made shots, missed shots, and whether in tele or autonomous.

[Amit3339]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

We have two presentations (slides + video) on our season strategy and scouting strategy. We are trying to get them up on our website.

We don't have "separate" strategy subteams. They are overlays from other subteams. We have the entire team in on the Kick Off design strategy for several days. This lasts about a day and an half. They we're off to prototyping.

Our scouting app team spends time developing methods to capture desirable traits for our first and second picks. In that process we find other strategy nuggets.

At competition, we have a student specifically tasked with setting match strategy based on analysis before the competition and updated with our scouting data on our smartphone app. Our scouting system kicks out our draft pick lists. We then have a smaller group of about half a dozen get together to set up our draft lists. That team is made up of mentors, lead scouts, match strategy and a pit scout.

Can you give more information about scouting strategy? I'm not sure I fully understand it's meaning

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

We do the same...we just take in A LOT of data. We've recorded positions of events since 2012. That's knowing where teams are scoring (with heatmaps), fouls, and defensive efforts. We have 4G tablets and have teams come help us.

We tried heat maps in the first 2014 regional and it was to overwhelming for the scouts and we lost accuracy elsewhere. So we cut back to just counting type data.