Team Member Accountability

[Hitchhiker 42]

Our team has a very lax approach to this. Our general rule is to say when you are coming, and come when you say you are coming. It works well for most of the season, but we ran into a few problems during deciding who gets to skip two days of school for NE DCMP. Given that our team is small, we were able to do this case-by-case, which worked well. For a larger team, not recommended though.

[C.Lesco]

Originally Posted by Hitchhiker 42

Our team has a very lax approach to this. Our general rule is to say when you are coming, and come when you say you are coming. It works well for most of the season, but we ran into a few problems during deciding who gets to skip two days of school for NE DCMP. Given that our team is small, we were able to do this case-by-case, which worked well. For a larger team, not recommended though.

Pretty well this for my team, to figure out whos doing what juat ask around the individual sections no need to really beurocrat it up in my opinion. The captain for each section should have the knowledge of whos good on their section and whos not. Have a meetup of all the captains and just run through the names of each member on the team. You'll easilly figure out whos doing what where.

[jstrieb]

Some members of my team spent part of the summer designing a solution to this exact problem. In order to streamline team member accountability and job delegation we developed a team member front-end and a team leader front-end where team leaders put in jobs they need done and they either specify a member to whom the job should be delegated, or they let the system delegate it for them. We made it with an SQL database (to log jobs and team members' "accounts") with PHP forms connected to the team website. At the end of the job, both the team member and team leader rate the job based on how much they like it and how well it was done (respectively) and the system learns which categories of jobs are preferred by which people.

This not only allows us to ensure everyone who is present is doing something relevant to the team that also needs to be done, but it is working towards our goal of everyone doing the job they most want to do and it promotes accountability where we can log (based on start and completion times) exactly what kind of effort each team member is putting in. We haven't used it during the season yet, but beta tests seem promising. If it works well we'll open-source the code.

We decided to code our own that is custom-tailored to our team's needs, but there are existing "job management systems" that you can google for that will also probably help if you are interested in managing your team members that way.

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by jstrieb

Some members of my team spent part of the summer designing a solution to this exact problem. In order to streamline team member accountability and job delegation we developed a team member front-end and a team leader front-end where team leaders put in jobs they need done and they either specify a member to whom the job should be delegated, or they let the system delegate it for them. We made it with an SQL database (to log jobs and team members' "accounts") with PHP forms connected to the team website. At the end of the job, both the team member and team leader rate the job based on how much they like it and how well it was done (respectively) and the system learns which categories of jobs are preferred by which people.

This not only allows us to ensure everyone who is present is doing something relevant to the team that also needs to be done, but it is working towards our goal of everyone doing the job they most want to do and it promotes accountability where we can log (based on start and completion times) exactly what kind of effort each team member is putting in. We haven't used it during the season yet, but beta tests seem promising. If it works well we'll open-source the code.

We decided to code our own that is custom-tailored to our team's needs, but there are existing "job management systems" that you can google for that will also probably help if you are interested in managing your team members that way.

Also search for issue tracking systems (Jira is a popular professional one, but there are other open source ones)

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

Our team employes a Star Chart to keep our students on task.

It took me a while to find it - from the home page, navigate to "About" and "Travel Requirements".

We have similar requirements to qualify as an officer (leader) or as a varsity team member (travels to remote competitions and local competitions on school days). We usually have one student and one mentor who keep a centralized log of hours worked, funds raised, etc; I believe they use a spreadsheet on our Google drive. Numbers from the logs are often referred to when it comes time for our end-of-season awards in May.

As to why we track, we have far more students at the school casually interested in being on the robotics team than we have resources (shop and meeting space and mentors are more strained than $$). Early in the season (first two weeks of October this year) we have "tryouts", which expose prospective members to the various tasks involved in the team, present them a challenge, and meets about 2/3 as densely as during build season. So far, we have had more students "drop out" during tryouts than we have had to "select out" after tryouts. We track service hours separately from build/writing hours, but do not break down work hours any farther.

[xjschwen]

We just made the switch from paper log to a quickbooks online timesheet.

This lets us create reports on a weekly/monthly/quarterly basis.

Each team member has to log hours they want credit for in an online timesheet. They can do extra or make up hours lost because of things like Cross Country or Marching Band. But they have work on approved projects if it is outside of a normal meeting.

Along with seeing how many hours each member logs we can also see the details of what they worked on.

We as mentors are liking this approach because when the team member enter the real world they will have to log timesheets and document what they spent their time on.

If they forget to log it... they do not get credit for it.


Jeff