Team Structures and Design approaches

[Texas]

Hi guys,
I'm doing my final year project on the design of an FSAE car, and the management approaches appropriate to this kind of work.
Part of this is looking at other teams approaches, and finding out what has worked for them.
So, I was wondering, what's your teams structure (Team leader, chief engineer, subsystem etc), and what's your design approach? If you have changed from previous years, why? What didn't work? What are the pro's and con's of your methods?

Thanks in advance!

[Texas]

Hi guys,
I'm doing my final year project on the design of an FSAE car, and the management approaches appropriate to this kind of work.
Part of this is looking at other teams approaches, and finding out what has worked for them.
So, I was wondering, what's your teams structure (Team leader, chief engineer, subsystem etc), and what's your design approach? If you have changed from previous years, why? What didn't work? What are the pro's and con's of your methods?

Thanks in advance!

[Ben K]

One of our main approaches is the idea of 90% design.

Why spend 24 hours on a part to get 100% of the way there when you can spend 12 hours to get 90%? Think of the next part that could get done in the extra hours you spend saving 1/4 of a pound. This has allowed us to build a car with limited resources and time.

Sometimes you just gotta build a car.

Ben

[Bemo]

+1 to Ben. We call it the 80/20 theory. You get 80% of the ideal result in 20% of the time.

But back to the origianl question of Texas. Quite a lot of teams have their team structure at their websites, so maybe you could try to watch out there to get a first impression.

Besides I'd recommend the "Reasoning your way through the FSAE design process" thread on this forum. People from severela teams posted their ideas there.

But here some words according how it's done here in Stuttgart. We always worked pretty independent from our uni. We get our shop and quite some support from their, but the organisation and all important desicions are only our own business.
Every year we have about 35 active team members. Compared to other top teams that's rather small. But to our experience you're better off with less team members who work more.
The team is alway lead by three people. There's the chief engineer, the head of organisation and the project manager. Then every sub team has a captain and every team member has got his very own work package. That means for the technical part every team member is responsible for one part and has a unique task. If we feel that something is too much work for one person we don't give it just to two people, we split the task into two minor tasks which are each given someone.

We never really had major changes in this structure as it worked pretty well for us ;-)

[Scott Wordley]

There is a guy called Geoff Pearson who you should probably talk to about this...

[Francis Gagné]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Bemo:
+1 to Ben. We call it the 80/20 theory. You get 80% of the ideal result in 20% of the time.
</div></BLOCKQUOTE>

In FSAE it's more 80% of performance in 80% of the time, the other 20% of perfomance is achieved through the remaining 80% of time. So to make the perfect car you only need to manage to have 160% of your time and you should be ok.

But seriously, team structure will depend a lot of the team size, currently we are about 14 active members. What we have learned over the years (and in other design projects) is that the Chief/Indians ratio is critical, too much chiefs and nothing get done in a very structured way, too much indians and things get incoherently done all over the place.

We currently have 1 team manager, 1 power-drive-train leader, 1 chassis-suspension leader, and the people that get it done splitted in subsystems (But that is very flexible). But at this team size the manager and leaders have to do a lot of doing through the managing in order to get the car running.

We have full team meeting every weekend to keep people informed about what is going on. We work together the rest of the day, there is also a weeknight that is mandatory. Of course the prefered work schedule is 24/7!

[Texas]

Scott/Ben: Already have Big Birds thread in a word document to go over while I'm at work and there's nothing to do, so it looks like I'm doing something http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif
Geoff's also my supervisor and mentor for this (bonus having him at Uni, not gonna lie), so I'm constantly hounding him for ideas, pretty sure he'll be sick of my face soon.

Bemo: What are the roles for chief engineer, head of Organisation, and project manager (just generally), we've changed our structure a bit from TEam Leader and Chiefy to something similar to Stuttgarts this year, and we're looking at a bit of a grey area of how to incorporate the new role.

Thanks for the info guys, it's really appreciated http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

[Bemo]

Well the roles of chief engineer and head of organisation are pretty clear defined. The whole team is divided into a technical and an organisational team. So these to are leading these to teams.
For the chief engineer that means that he has to know the status of all the subteams, must recognize occuring problems if people don't recognize them themselves. He also has to organize the manufacturing. And is the supervisor for building, repairing and running the car.
The head of organisation is responsible for all non-technical things like sponsoring, marketing, team events...
But by responsible I mean that he/she has to keep the overview so nothing gets missed.
Project manager is a bit harder to define (even though I had that position for a year). One thing is that he is kind of the connection between technical and organsisational team and supports the other two team leaders. But he is the one who takes a lot of representative tasks. Presenting the team at events etc.
In our case the project manager is also the head of the non-profit organisation we founded as a legal basis for the team. So he must also keep the overview over the team finances and has to deal witz the fiscal authorities (which is quite hard in Germany ;-)).