Team Structure

2024-25 Leadership

Team Structure

1. Team Captain:  Logan Holtje, Shreeya T_______

   1. Develop/enhance team processes and shared vision

   2. Establish team-wide metrics and address weak points

   3. Inter/Intra team building to maximize effectiveness

   4. Organize season schedules and team-wide events

   5. Drives the team's schedules

   6. Main communicator from students to mentors and boosters

   7. Maximize the value of fall and post-season training

   8. Use team input to make major decisions

   9. Hold leads accountable for their responsibilities and help those struggling

   10. Backstop all sub-team leads

   11. Help establish the project’s success criteria

   12. Identify requirements and constraints

   13. Set a detailed timeline and monitor the progress of a project

   14. Identify and mitigate risks as early as possible

   15. Help the team adjust to project changes and reach checkpoints within a reasonable time frame

   16. Final say on project decisions

   17. The final call on buying new parts

   18. Establishes deadlines for the proposal phase, prototype and test phase, main prototype phase, final construction of mechanisms, electrical board construction, autonomous programming, teleoperated programming, etc. 

   19. Ensures operations are making progress on arranging outreach events, reaching sponsors, creating FIRST presentations, and sponsors are appropriately represented on the final robot, on team shirts, and team banner

   20. Directs the agenda and the team

2. Main Sub-teams

   1. Mechanical: 

• Leads: Gabe Kim, Abhay Nagaraj  

2. 1. 1. 1. If needed, prepare training plans

         2. Teach the training materials (w/ mentors)

         3. Keep track of the progress of the tasks their subteam needs to do (through any form of task management. Ex. Kanban, Clickup, spreadsheet, etc).

         4. Figure out what parts to order for the robot (w/ captain and mentors)

         5. CADmiral - CAD lead (Abhay ) 

            1. Ensure CAD is properly integrated with the Robot

            2. Responsible for creating a system to organize CAD files and ensuring that the CAD files on Onshape or elsewhere are organized

• make sure that the "ideas" are in their own category. Then when they become a part of the robot, transfer their files to one titled "robot"(or something).

2. 1. 1. 5. 3. During build season ensures all members who aren’t in the workshop have a CAD project to work on.

            4. Trains rookies during pre-season on CADing

         6. Manufacturing - Workshop lead (Gabe ) 

            1. Must ensure the workshop is getting cleaned at the end of meetings

            2. Ensures every member has a manufacturing job into the build season if they are not doing CAD

            3. Does their best to maintain an inventory list

            4. Trains rookies during pre-season on using the workshop, closet, shed, etc. 

            5. Responsible for "quick and dirty" prototypes and fixes and modifications that do not require precise and accurate machine tools

         7. Fabrication (Logan Holtje)

            1. Head of precision and accurate manufacturing: train new members on precision equipment and machines

            2. Identifies parts that need to be made accurately and precisely and after ensuring an appropriate design is complete (and possible to be manufactured)  fabricates the necessary parts

            3. Responsible for manufacturing precise and accurate parts for final robot

         8. Hardware & Development - (Shreeya Thakre)

            1. During pre-season, manages the returning members so that they either continue their training by working on projects (see team Captain for project ideas or come up with more) or assist in training rookies. 

            2. This lead can switch roles (and switch back) with one of the other Mech leads at any time if both agree.

            3. Ensures throughout the pre-season and build season that every member has a task/project to work on.  

            4. Ensures that CAD is updated and completed before any finalized manufacturing is done

• General

1. Designing the robot.

2. Make sure the robot is within regulations. (Mechanical checklist from FRC)

3. Creating a bill of materials.

4. Fabricating the robot.

5. Testing different mechanisms of the robot.

2. 2. Electrical

• Leads: 

2. 2. 1. 1. If needed, prepare training plans

         2. Teach Training materials (w/ mentors)

         3. Order parts for the robot (w/ mentors)

         4. Keep track of progress of the tasks their subteam needs to do (on Clickup).

• General:

1. Make sure the electrical aspects of the robot are in the regulations (electrical checklist from FRC).

2. Gather information about what mechanisms need in terms of electrical components.

3. Plan the electrical board based on what the mechanisms need.

4. If needed, plan the pneumatics board based on what the mechanisms need.

5. Have a bill of materials for the parts that need to be bought.

6. Fabricate the electrical board, and if needed the pneumatics board.

2. 3. Software

• Leads: 

1. Prepare training plans as needed

2. Check-in, Work, + Finalize Pre-training with Pre-training Leads

3. Ensure software section of wiki is organized + up-to-date

4. Ensure software is documented for debugging and testing and maintained on GitHub

5. Keep track of programming progress

6. Help members develop programming skills

7. Conduct code reviews with all software members + mentors

• Pre-training Leads:

1. Prepare + Teach Pre-training material

2. Grade Quizzes 

3. Help + Answer Questions for Rookies

• General

1. Program subsystems

2. Communicate with Mechanical + Electrical sub-teams to understand robot design

2. 4. Operations

• Lead: Catherine Steinberg

1. Help members develop skills for business operations and outreach 

2. Create weekly to-do lists to keep up with the season schedule

• General

1. Find and organize outreach events

2. Support stem events,

3. Organize events aimed to help STEM minorities

4. Manage the budget

5. Maintain and recruit sponsors

6. Write the bi-monthly newsletter

7. Apply for grants

8. Use subteam input to make major operations decisions

3. Other Sub-teams/Roles (during Entire Year)

   1. Safety: tbd

      1. Ensure there is PPE being worn (in the shop or at competitions).

      2. Safety members need to be aware of safety procedures for each subteam.

      3. Make sure those safety procedures are followed.

      4. Make sure all members have passed the safety quiz (school made).

      5. Make sure all members have filled out the safety forms.

   2. Communications

      1. Makes sure that every member is on:

         1. Slack

         2. Teamsnap

         3. Team's Google Drive

         4. Clickup

      2. Handles the announcements that are sent out to each member.

      3. Handles calendar dates (put on Clickup) for events. Make sure to let members know of these things:

         1. Location

         2. Time

   3. Integrations

      1. Assists the team Captain in communicating between the technical sub-teams together to transfer project steps and ideas appropriately 

      2. The team Captain can delegate responsibilities to the integration lead for assistance

   4. Integrated Project Teams (IPT)

      1. New structure used for build season that sectioned mechanism development for the robot into separate teams

      2. Each team consisted of Mechanical, Electrical, and Software members that were responsible to work together during the entire design process to ensure mechanisms were realistic to program and had essential sensors and wiring allocation.

      3. Consists of the team leads and unique 'IPT leads' which were essentially leads in training

      4. Team Captain supervised and managed

      5. Reflections:

         1. This system has the potential to be really effective at turning the large problem of the robot into smaller problems of each mechanism while maintaining sub team specific tasks of electrical taking care of the electrical board, software programming the robot, and mechanical designing and building the robot.

         2. Issues:

            1. Requires substantial and constant communication among the teams every meeting. 

            2. Extremely difficult for Team Captain to maintain project management without sacrificing working on the design and build of the robot (hard for someone in a role whose responsibility is the final say on all robot design decisions).

            3. In order to maintain team synergy and integration, again communication is required, scoring and intake this year designed their mechanisms in a vacuum not much thought was put into integrating the two was made until it was too late.

         3. Pros:

            1. Good for getting more people involved in the robot due to the groups being smaller than an entire sub team (particularly for mechanical) so using task management strategies is easier on a smaller scale. (Requires the IPT groups to use said task management strategies however, Kanban would be helpful)

            2. Great for electrical and software to feel heard and get a say on robot design decisions

4. Other Sub-teams (during Comp Season and off-season competitions only)

   1. Strategy

      1. Be very familiar with the game's objectives and rules.

      2. List and organize the robot's "skills", actions that the robot could partake in, from moving on the carpet to shooting a gamepiece.

      3. Develop an optimal game strategy during Kickoff that takes into account current team capabilities and points vs. robot development effort.

      4. Finding the optimal strategy could include numerical simulations (with google spreadsheets to keep track of points & timings).

      5. Develop a Robot Design Strategy that defines the robot's criteria and specifications.

      6. Prioritize the criteria and specifications of the robot for an optimal build season (more important criteria and specifications completed first).

      7. Unify the team's vision on the game strategy and robot design strategy via a team review for a cohesive build season.

   2. Scouting

      1. Determine metrics to scout and develop/improve upon a scouting system

      2. Ensure Drive Coach receives a pre-match breakdown before every match

      3. Arrive at competitions with data on every team that has already competed (and are attending that competition)

      4. Develop a scouting schedule and ensure scouts arrive and provide accurate data

      5. Prep team members on expectations during competition and the importance of scouting

      6. Learning and being proficient in all forms of scouting

      7. Work with the software team on creating a scouting app

      8. Lead prepares training materials and prepares a training lesson on scouting for those attending a competition

      9. Ensure all  scouting materials are  up to date with the game being played and works with the team's current strategy

      10. Work with the strategy team on prioritizing the most important scouting data according to the team's strategy