How does your team approach strategic design at kickoff/in general?
How does your team approach game analyses?
What are your priorities?
How do you come up with an effective bot to achieve your goals?
What are some mistakes your team has made in the past in regards to strategic design?
I would highly suggest going through all of Karthik’s talks over the years. IMO it is the best summarized use of strategic design.
I posted this a while ago, but our kickoff strategy hasn’t really changed since.
Do you mind me asking what your teams goals are year by year and how your design shifts around them? Or do you use this as a sort of “one size fits all” model.
Before kickoff each season we discuss as a team our goals for the season. That includes competition goals like “make it to Champs” or “win an event”, as well as more process-oriented goals like “design within our abilities” and “give programming at least 2 weeks with the robot before the first competition”.
I’d say the process that I posted would work for pretty much any goals you choose, but obviously different goals will change the decisions you make throughout the process.
Recently, one of our season goals is to reach the finals at one of our local district events. We felt this a necessary step after years of trying to swing higher in our designs seeking to be competitive at our DCMP or Worlds thinking too far ahead in the season. Before being a contender at those events we needed to learn to be consistently competitive at our early qualifiers.
After Kickoff we discuss what we think is the best robot we can build in four weeks and scale things back from there slightly. Teams don’t have six weeks to build a robot. This is often what’s advertised in FRC when we talk about the program and is far from the truth.
You really have 3, at most 4, weeks to build a robot and use the remaining 3-4 weeks before the first competition to test software, prove mechanisms work, iterate as needed, build autonomous modes, and let the driver’s practice. If you don’t leave your team time for these key activities, you are likely sacrificing in your team’s performance on the field.
We try to have very honest discussions in the first days of the season about where we feel the team is at in these areas to ensure every key group on the engineering team is considered in our design choices.
If we feel our strategic design is too ambitious to for all these sub-areas to get done in opening weeks of build season, it’s time to dial things back and remove some scope. Or we need to make key concessions in one of the three areas to make it happen. Like scaling back, the design and mechanical complexity so we could make a full Alpha version of the robot in the first 1.5 weeks. This allowed the software team to have extra time to work on code development. Sometimes it looks like ignoring a challenge completely to reduce scope - like ignoring tipped cones.
Sometimes your best strategy is to put the blinders on and not focus on what other teams will put on the field. Focus on the best robot your team can put on the field.
To clarify, your team made the decision that only after you became consistently competitive at your qualifying events, that you would start planning your design around being DCMP finalists? And if so was this the model you used to achieve that consistency?
DCMP Finalist was not the goal. Reaching finals at our District qualifiers before DCMP has been our goal.
This formed going into the 2022 season. The 2-year gap during the pandemic was a reset period for the team. We really felt like when we came back it was time to shake off a lot of bad habits. A big one of ours was biting off more than we could chew and consistently not performing like we had hoped until the offseason and having terrible opening events. Our lead design student shared similar ideas here and many of the mentors agreed.
Something we did was mapped out our history to show our competitive results from 2015 - 2019 weren’t matching our general robot strategy of building a robot capable of winning events. Typically that meant do everything fairly poorly. Our software team always suffered the consequences of design and mechanics taking weeks to build the robot longer than planned. Our build blog spoke a little about this last year and our W-8 Strategy at Kickoff.
To change that in 2022 we set our target on a few priorities that were loosely documented at the time.
This was a drastic reduction in scope for our team and was a general push of stop trying to do everything. There was a lot of debate that first week if the scope was too small. A new mindset we focused on was if we get all this done all we can do is more. The game also was generally easy to build smart so Low Goal Fender robots could turn into High Goal Fender robots and add a Traversal Climber.
When will we focus on the next level of DCMP Finals? Not sure. For now balancing our strategic objectives with the size of our team and what we can achieve has been our focus. We just graduated a huge class and have a very young group so I see us maintaining the same mindset to ensure we build sustainability.
Apologies to the OP if this has gotten off topic.
I highly recommend using the Shaker Sheet to provide more structure when reviewing the game manual. I’ve found that giving students specific things to look for helps keep them engaged. We break into groups of 5, with each group led by a mentor and member of leadership. Each group completes a copy of the shaker sheet, and then we all come back as a big group and complete a new copy of the shaker sheet. That way we can make sure that everyone is on the same page about each segment.
I’m considering writing a whitepaper that breaks down running a kickoff weekend from end to end so that teams can use it as a jumping-off point for their own scheduling. Let me know something like that would be helpful.
You can find a presentation on 1678’s strategic design process at this website: 2022 Fall Workshops - Citrus Circuits
I was bored at work today and sorted through 30ish threads related to kickoff planning on CD (data found here). After doing so, I realized that the incredible @ShelbyA beat me to the punch by 10 months! I would highly recommend this thread and presentation. It’s excellent stuff.
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