Project Management and FIRST?

[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.