This week’s question is a submission from CD’s favorite non-fiction writer, and she was wondering a bit more about the inner-workings of our teams. So, for her, please take a few moments to answer this question. You never know where the things you describe may end up!
Question of the Week 07-27-03: What is a typical team meeting is like? Who sticks to an agenda, if any? Who spends more time teaching, or talking about fundraising, or doing other things?
Anything you can share about how your team runs its meetings would be great, I’m sure. Everyone stands to learn something about good methods for controlling a big group of excited people, as well.
Well everyone team meeting tends to have a different agenda for us, so we stick to whatever it is we planned on meeting about.
We have 6 ( I think? ) active members at this moment so a lot of times work overlaps and we have to find out who can do what, so everyone is there and we can figure out what to do with everyone. In general summer meetings are small and more discussion like so a lot of structure isn’t needed.
During build season our team tends to grow, and thus our meeting structure is more important. We usually try to have a meeting first where all build groups get together and discuss what we’ve done, what needs to get done and misc. important things. This meetings where often run by a student, which is going to change this year, because the students want more mentor involvment on my team this year. We tried to do this every meeting however, whenever the student who ran the meetings didn’t show up on time ( due to prior arrangements or something ) the meeting seemed to just get skipped, tho on saturdays they became somewhat mandatory. After large group meeting, we break of into smaller groups with our repsective mentors and work w/ them and are assigned our jobs.
Our meetings sometimes seemed somewhat superficial but were good for keeping people on pace, and for some sort of structure which our team seemed to lack this year. But hopefully with some new mentors that we’ve gotten it will be more structured and kept on pace. The size of our team is also most likely to double or even tripple next year so structure will be extremely important to keep every aspect of the team on task.
This how everything seemed to work this year… but sometimes we didn’t have enough time to meet and just had to get right to work
After school is the most complex ones where we have our teacher head talking about how things are going FIRST wise, then our sub-division heads talk about their divisions, then another person talks about the current FIRST community and any updates (I wonder who that could be? )
Then the team breaks up and we tackle our related problems.
During school meetings are less complex and are just a synopsis of whats going on and then we have to leave.
Our typical team meetings have multiple presenters, talking and telling us about what needs to be completed before the next time that we meet. Most of the time, the agenda is stuck to because we don’t have time not to. We have to much do!!! The presenters(mentors) normally allow time for student imput though, especially if it’s something that they feel needs to be discussed. Hopefully that helped!!!
Planning stages:
Mingle mingle. Leader take control. Start going Mentor get us back on subject. Me walk to the computer, start taking notes on the meeting Goes through meeting in a not so organized way. Break, go to seperate subgroups, few people work, others mingle and talk.
Building:
Hey I’m here, I’ll be in the shop, Hey I’m here I’ll be programming, “”"" I’ll be animating, etc etc.
Our team meetings are a little crazy sometimes. Usually one of the Mentors types up a sheet of paper with all the things we need to discuss at the meeting, like fundraising, Ideas for the Chairmans Award, upcomming events to make the team stronger. Then we usually break into groups and work on our indiv. projects, like the wedsite, programming, and drivetrain. We have meetings every other week to keep everyone updated on whats going on, there is also a weekly email that goes out to all the members incase they couldnt come to the meeting. Over all its pretty organized although at times we do get off topic (a lot).
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