Gantt Charts/Timelines for your build season. Post 'em!

[Chi Meson]

My team seems to have taken to Trello very quickly.

This will be the first year that we will be hitting the build season with a proper, full-team organizational application. Still testing the waters, but we needed some kind of communication system better than FB or a website forum.

And unlike FB, I can require all members to join in.

[Dan Richardson]

One of most important tools for any project is a schedule. A Gantt Chart is a great way to get organized. At work I use Project or Primavera, but for FIRST excel or a Google Doc works wonders. It doesn't have to complicated to be useful, sometimes high level is all you need.

There's a couple of factors that can be even more important than what type of schedule. One is associating an appropriate amount of work to a given task. Things will rarely go quicker than expected, so account for that too. If you don't know how long something will take, allow for some time to learn the factors you don't know. Build in time to practice, code, test, adjust and sleep... Another factor is to hold sub teams accountable to their tasks and compromise as needed.

I believe, if more teams went through this exercise, it would drive them to simpler design choices and more competitive solutions. In Exploding Bacon's first two seasons we made significant design sacrifices in order to allow sufficient driver practice and autonomous programming. It resulted in an a championship division finalist and division win. In both cases the schedule made the decisions for us. In the years we stretched, and missed dates, we struggled.

Robot in 3 days recently posted an example of a simplified 2013 Gantt Chart here.

It was originally developed in Goodle Docs and shared amongst team members there.

[alb4h]

Dan,
What's the 'Test kit and and data collection' item on your chart?

Ann

[Dan Richardson]

Scratched my head on this one for a while.

I believe it's main purpose is to test the hardware, electrical and software components that come in the kit. This was from a time where the kit components where a bit more surprising then they are today. It would be more relevant if the GDC throws us a curve ball. The task also can apply to sensors, software, electronic components as well.

We had a bad habit of disappearing into our cad rooms without thoroughly investigating what was in the kit, how it worked, and it's general limits of operation. Adding the task ensured we at least thought about it before we checked it off.

[Trying to Help]

Originally Posted by Dan Richardson

One of most important tools for any project is a schedule. A Gantt Chart is a great way to get organized. At work I use Project or Primavera, but for FIRST excel or a Google Doc works wonders. It doesn't have to complicated to be useful, sometimes high level is all you need.

There's a couple of factors that can be even more important than what type of schedule. One is associating an appropriate amount of work to a given task. Things will rarely go quicker than expected, so account for that too. If you don't know how long something will take, allow for some time to learn the factors you don't know. Build in time to practice, code, test, adjust and sleep... Another factor is to hold sub teams accountable to their tasks and compromise as needed.

I believe, if more teams went through this exercise, it would drive them to simpler design choices and more competitive solutions. In Exploding Bacon's first two seasons we made significant design sacrifices in order to allow sufficient driver practice and autonomous programming. It resulted in an a championship division finalist and division win. In both cases the schedule made the decisions for us. In the years we stretched, and missed dates, we struggled.

Robot in 3 days recently posted an example of a simplified 2013 Gantt Chart here.

It was originally developed in Goodle Docs and shared amongst team members there.

Dan, thanks for posting this. A good deal of tonight's team meeting was spent talking about scheduling from both a high level and a very detailed level. I'm going to share your successes and struggles with my team.

One of the hard parts about trying to move industry tools into FIRST is that not only do we have adolescents that rightfully have other priorities but our most experienced members leave each year! That body of group knowledge just doesn't stay the way you'd like it to.