Project Management and FIRST?

[seanwitte]

www.dotproject.com is an a link to an open source project management tool. It will allow you to enter tasks and task dependencies. It also generates Gantt charts.

Part of project management that would be beneficial to address is risk management. For each requirement or set of dependent tasks, maintain a risk list and try to mitigate them. High risk tasks should be pushed earlier in the schedule.

A task like "produce drive module code" has very clear risks:
1) If the task is not completed before the drive train is completed you will hold up testing of the rest of the robot and driver training.
2) If the task is not complete before ship date you can't compete.

The mitigation is easy:
1) Incrementally code/test/verify starting with the most basic code needed to move. Once that's working then add bells and whistles to fill out the schedule.

[ayeckley]

Originally Posted by Doug Leppard

Also be prepared to work out the human problems, the disagreements and such.

This is key.

One big difference between professional PM'ing and FIRST is that FIRST is essentially a volunteer effort. Being a PM on a volunteer effort is very much like herding cats. Doing it professionally can be too, but to a somewhat smaller degree. A good FIRST PM (or leader in any capacity) is characterized more by how they deal with "human" challenges, rather than by how well they assign slack time in MS Project.

Case in point: project deadlines. Volunteers don't always accept or internalize deadlines, especially at the start of a project. Successful PMs/leaders are those who can get the team to deliver *even if there is no apparent penalty for not delivering*.

I suspect most everybody understands that already...

[Doug Leppard]

Originally Posted by ayeckley

One big difference between professional PM'ing and FIRST is that FIRST is essentially a volunteer effort.

I so agree, with your agreeing with me . I have seen so many teams self destruct because of human issues. Such a short time to build and tensions are high and many on the team are young and some immature.

You need to have PM but it needs to be a light version and you main leaders need to own the goals.

[Chris Fultz]

Originally Posted by Chris Fultz

I did a presentation for the Purdue FIRST class in late 2006 about project management. I will find it and add it to the white papers.

Paper is uploaded. It is a Power Point presentation.
Search for "Project Management".

[Bomberofdoom]

I've just received the notice about PTC sponsership to FIRST.

I checked out the review clip about their windchill program and I think it's great.


Another opinion that came to my mind:

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.

But if your a student leader and want to do things professionaly and in the best way you can, my opinion is that you'd probablly want to use PM.

[Maggie27]

We did have some management, but at the end everyone just came together and worked on whatever they could.

[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.

[dpc131]

As some have stated Systems Engineering and Project Management are extremely effective in the build season. We implemented a Systems Engineering course for the student leaders last year and it helped them in running the team's design and build period. Although not directly project management, we still showed them how to schedule the season and hold design reviews at critical checkpoints of the buiild.

There was a few comments on how the schedule was thrown out when they needed to redesign. Although sometimes that is inevitable, using Systems Engineering will minimize the chances of a total redesign. For example, last year we had a subsystem redesign; but we identified up front how it interfaced with the other systems. The redesign had to maintain those interfaces so that the rest of the robot could continue to get built during the design change. It allowed us to stay on schedule and re-direct extra resources to the redesign.

Moral of the story, as you begin your build season, think of how subsystems will interface to each other, talk about them, write them down and if you need to change a subsystem make sure that the interfaces change as little as possible.