Project Management and FIRST?

[Andrew Rudolph]

One huge thing thats hard for inexperience people and teams when pertaining to first is actually knowing weather or not your schedule is even doable. Its easy for a mechanical team member to say, oh yeah they need 1 day to program the robot, when in actuality they neeed much more.
Thats one of the reasons looking at other peoples schedules might not help, becuase say one team has 8 machinists who can make parts for them can fabricate a drivetrain in 2 days, as where a team with a jigsaw and dremel can't work that fast. With that said, our team is broken down into many subteams, each subteam has a knowledgable student or mentor incharge. That person reports back to the overall project manager. The PM is the one who keeps everyone moving in the right direction. Thankfully our team has been truely blessed with having one of the best PMs ever. Not everyone will be so lucky, the secret to his magic is that he takes the time to understand what everyone is doing and can help motivate the team and direct the team. A huge part of his sucess is that the team respects him. In our case he is a programmer, but when he comes over to the mechanical area, even if he has no idea what we are doing we respect his opinion in moving in the apropriate directions. With that said, pretty much all he does for the team is bounce around making sure things are working towards the same goal. We also have meetings often seeing what everyone else is doing in case anyone has an idea that can help with issues.

Finally, the biggest point that already has been brought up is its better (in our case, as with other teams) to spend an extra couple days early making finalized design decisions and making good drawings. This goes with much of my education in school, basically you draw it up, then build what you drew. Its pretty easy to make a mistake in the rush of things, "whats 1 + 2?....4 right, ok *****SZZZZZzzzzzaw*** oh my bad." it goes back to the old addage of measure twice cut once, if you have it in front of you, cut it 3" long, then you save alot of time and mistakes rather than just saying to someone, "ok make that thing" and point to a whiteboard drawing. It saves alot of headaches.