Project Management and FIRST?

[seanwitte]

Originally Posted by Bomberofdoom

If you want the project to be mostly educational, you should try not to use project mangement, because project mangement is quite ristrictional (which is required for sirious projects). If you want to plan how the learning and education progress will go, you can use the method of PM for that.

Project Management methods are tools to manage time and resources (students, money, material, etc.). It's not restrictive unless you make it so. It would be very difficult to make sure everything needed to build a FRC robot is finished without some planning. A tool like Windchill allows you to make a list of everything you need to do and organize it to fit the time and resources available. This includes administrative tasks like arranging travel, shipping, and payments, as well as designing, building, and testing the robot. A very handy and effective way to analyze a project is with a Gantt chart. It will be very obvious, even to a novice, when things are going South. If you're running two weeks behind is it worth starting to work on something that will take 3 weeks, knowing there is almost no chance you'll finish? When tasks start to slip you need to adjust because those 6 weeks will pass in a blink. Unless you have a plan you won't even know you're behind.