Organizing the Team

[Necrobata]

Salutations everyone, i was wondering if i could get some useful info about organizing the team.

The deal is that the elders of the team are about to graduate and they were a team of 5-8 ppl, they carried out the last years projetcs with a lot of effort and its time for them to pass the torch to a new generation, the thing is that, now we have about 30 members eager to work even harder to develop a good car, we never had that quantity, and we kinda lack a tiny little bit of organization.

Now when i say organization im not talking about the President, vicepresident thingys, im talking about the branches, how can you set the suspension team to work properly? chassis ppl to organize their work, i want to know how can we assemble a team that works together like a swiss watch.

Excuse my language if i have spoken unproperly, english isnt my born language, if you have any suggestions about how can we start i would love to read your comments.


Thanks!!

[BrendonD]

Read the "Reasoning your way through the FSAE Design Process" Thread. Twice.

The truth is, if you haven't done this before, you won't assemble a team that works like a swiss watch. If you have prior documentation and skilled workers who have built complex projects before, you're in a pretty good spot and you should have the resources needed to finish a car. 30 people is awesome. Managing 30 people is not awesome.

My advice:

One person at the top running the show, two is fine but their responsibilities need to be clearly delineated; the proverbial buck needs to stop somewhere. They will hate their lives at times, but this comes with the territory.

Have people work together and design things together. If you have your sub-team leaders set, have them figure out what they want their team to know and then take steps to train people so they can be effective. Most knowledge transfer is ad-hoc, so the more of that you can generate in random work sessions the better, it's very much a team culture thing.

Pick your new leaders (the ones that come after you) a couple months before competition. I transitioned my team over almost completely to my replacements before competition, brought them in on decisions, copied them on my e-mails, made them a part of my day-to-day workflow. After the competition ended I've done very little decision making, they are already running the team without my assistance and doing well so far. They need to be empowered to lead the team before you leave.

I could go on and on, but I'll let others chime in. Best of luck!

BrendonD
Team Leader Emeritus

[Bemo]

As Brendon already mentioned read the "Reasoning your way through the FSAE Design Process" thread will be a good start.

There isn't the one correct answer how a team of 30 members should be organised. As teams can be successful with very different technical solutions you can be succesful with different solutions for team organisation.

In that thread Geoff from RMIT started to explain how they worked their and made the team to one of the most succesful in the world. Several people from other teams then started to share how their teams are/were organised and the advantages and disadvantages they experienced.

You have to decide yourself which concept you prefer...