How is your team structured?

[sanddrag]

We've departmentalized into this structure. We have about 30-36 students.

Mentors
President
Vice President
CAD
CAM
CNC Machining
Welding
Fabrication & Prototyping
Animation
Programming
Business
Media (photo, web, video)

[5113sean]

Our team is actually pretty structured but it also works off natural leadership. Over the summer, everyone gets to know each other and we complete some small projects, so by pre-season, we are pretty much ready to vote on leadership. We formally vote on president (this past year resulted in a tie, leading to two co-presidents, or, as was theme, a king and a queen), a marketing lead, a mechanical lead, a software lead, and an integration and safety lead. Any ties or near ties result in shared positions.

In the beginning of the year, new students are encouraged to build defenses to learn about tools and safety.

Mechanical is divided into subteams which depend on the game each year. This year, we had a chassis team, an arm team, and a shooter team. Each subteam has an informal leader.

Software is based on skill so those with more skill generally teach the new students and therefore have more code to write.

Electrical has a lead, but generally the group is small so the don't necessarily need subgroups.

Integration is split into integration and safety. Integration has a secretary and a leader for each award application. There are also ambassadors from integration that communicate back and forth between the other groups. Safety is headed by the safety captain.

Marketing is broken up by projects. Generally, the person who came up with the idea is the head of the project unless they feel more comfortable with someone else in charge. There is also a head for communication with the school board and our sponsors.

A lot of our positions overlap (for example, one person would take the responsibility for multiple award applications), but it seems to work. There's a lot less confusion overall and we were able to build a pretty darn good bot this year.

[Gravity]

Just a general overview of our team's structure with an org chart provided below.

General Statistics:
Amount of students: 38
Years as an FRC Team: 1
Male Students: 31
Female Students: 7

Structural Information
As this was our rookie year we continually updated our structure to meet certain needs throughout the season. We also started the team in late October, which made it a hassle to create a robust team structure before the start of the build season.

Leadership
This year our leadership division was comprised of two presidents, one prominently build and the other prominently business. The presidents were in charge of maintaining the leadership team and interfacing with the mentors. Just below them in the hierarchy was the technical and business directors. The directors were in charge of their corresponding subdivisions which will be listed below.

Technical Divisions

• Build

  Responsible for fabrication of the robot, submitting part requests to the finance lead and maintaining the team shop.

• Programming

  Responsible for the programming functions of team robots.

• CAD

  Oversees design operations and creates drawings for the build team to construct.

• Game Strategy

  Collaborates with the scouting team on game strategy and game mechanics. They are required to submit driver preferences to the programming lead and train potential drivers for the season.

• Scouting

  Responsible for maintaining the scouting team and creating visualizations from competition data.

• Safety

  Responsible for the individual member certification of shop tools. They must maintain a safe environment during the season.

Non-Technical/Business Divisions

• Marketing

  Responsible for social media and team design operations (e.g. logo design, merchandise, banners, etc.).
  

• Website

  Maintains the website content and team databases, and works closely with the marketing lead.
  

• Finance

  Responsible for managing the income and expenses of the team, and procurement.
  

• Outreach

  Responsible for maintaining and improving the team’s presence in the community by coordinating volunteer opportunities, robot demonstrations and team-led events.
  

• Scribe

  Responsible for taking minutes during meetings and updating leads on action items.
  

That pretty much wraps it up, we are going to be publishing complete role descriptions by the end of next year so that upcoming members know what they are getting into.

Feel free to pm me any questions about our team.

[guniv]

Overall, the team structure is mentors, over the team captain, over the student leaders. We have three departments, which is purely organizational and does not have a leader over them. Inside of the departments are our subteams which DO have leaders. We have departments because the students and leaders often help with the other subteams inside that dept's tasks (ex. HR lead will help Finance contact sponsors). We refer to student leaders + mentors as our "executive board" or team. Here is an easy easy way to understand our structure - a fancy image!

Engineering Design - Mechanical, Electrical, Programming, Game Strategy
These are all self-explanatory.
Branding Design - Communications, Products
Communications does website, social media, helps with awards. Products designs shirts, banners, costumes, pit, etc.
Business Relations - Finance, Human Resources
Finance raises and does some managing of funds (mostly mentors for latter). HR helps build relations in the team by making sure everyone has something to do, and also helps build relations with other teams.

As you can see, there are four engineering leaders and four non-engineering, and the Team Captain makes the final odd vote. This is a good, healthy balance for the team in making decisions.

To answer the rest of OP's specific questions: we've discussed it many times as a team, and we stick to having one team captain for a variety of reasons. One is that there needs to be total accountability and we can't have the captains contradicting each other or any type of confusion on that front. Another is the balance I discussed before, and frankly, it is already sometimes hard to find people to fill all leadership positions anyways and adding another wouldn't help.

Our team has about 40-45 students.

There are a lot of teams in here with "dynamic," changing structures and a crazy amount of leadership roles. Our team made a specific decision two years ago to set our roles concretely, and every leadership position has a specific role and contributes to a healthy team balance. We also think it gives students a goal to work towards - students can show initiative in specific teams to show they want to earn that leadership position (which is elected by the earlier student leaders). Even though this structure was developed sort of closed-door with two students and a mentor and enforced immediately, our team has really grown to it and really believes in it. At our Business Summit we hold for teams, one of the biggest things we emphasize is that having a strong organization structure can make for a strong team.

Happy to answer any questions about our structure.