Team Management!

[Kristina]

Wow...this thread topic is definately my calling since I'm big on management on my team. Last year the team was an afterschool club and this year its a class so the school expected a lot more from us. To do this we split up the class this way....

MANAGEMENT- This my group. We were in charge of getting everyone on the team to fundraise, ordering all of the parts, communicating with sponors and engineers, making travel arrangements, writing the newsletter, kept track of who was doing what and when, scourting, all the spirit stuff and all the nit picky details.

DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION- With the class King, Jeff, head of it. Most people were in this group and they worked on manually building the robot. I'd say about 10 people were in this group and they did all their work outside of class at Jeff's house.

EXTENDOR (aka special team)-This was a subdivision of Design and construction with about 5 people. No leader was appointed but one of the members Kyle stepped up to the plate and got the group working hard. By being in a seperate group, they could work on being creative and giving us the extra edge beyond the basic robot.

PNEUMNATICS- This two person team focused on all the pneumatic systems on our robot, knowing all the details inside and out.

ANIMATION- About 4 people and their leader learned all the animation stuff and put together a cool clip. Their animation skills have also been put to use for promo for our team.

I think that small intimate subgroups with leaders are really important because everyone feels useful and no one falls through the cracks. Its much easier to be a leader of a few people and make sure everyone has something to do and is doing their job.

I guess the only appointed leaders were me and Jeff because it was the two main big groups, and that worked out well. People felt that they had fellow students to go to when there were problems. Although many times you get blamed first for problems or complained to the most, its really rewarding in the end.