Team Management

[Aaron@Kaist]

Greetings Fellow FSAEer's

I guess its around time for a lot of teams to begin planning their recruiting events etc...Anyways, I have questions regarding team management. As the team manager it has been hard for me coordinating the team etc, mostly because I lack the tool most commonly used in the real world...Money..haha When I worked as a manager as various companies, it would be simple to control people using tools like commission and work hours etc, but here that tool seems to be non-existent.

Our team structure is that we have a marketing team, engine/power/drive line team captain, chassis suspension captain, and electronics captain.

The biggest problem however is motivating the students. We know that all of the students have joined have a common interest in motorsports and that they are commited to the cause, but it always seems as if they have something else as a priority. Of course this isn't the case for many members as I have some team members who spend day and night pondering about how to build the car. How do you guys get around to motivating your members? How do you spend your winter/summer vacations?

Also regarding marketing/sponsorship, it seems as 70% of our operations seem to be revolving around acquiring resources and sponsors, seems this portion of the program is much larger and "heavier" than the technical aspects...is this a stable approach to management or should more man power be allocated to technical problems?

Biggest question however, is..how do you train your freshman??? I'm sure not everyone joins the team as pro mechanics, and you guys must have some way of distributing your skill and professional know-how to the newbies, how do you do this? Our team has 17 freshmen...no sophs juniors or seniors...so I'm glad we have a team full of very promising members, but I was wondering how you manage the learning process.

Also, should management be involved in the technical areas as well? Or is this inefficient? I'm sure some degree of specialization is required no matter what field it is, but I just have no idea to what degree we should encourage specialization.

Thanks so much guys!!

[Aaron@Kaist]

Greetings Fellow FSAEer's

I guess its around time for a lot of teams to begin planning their recruiting events etc...Anyways, I have questions regarding team management. As the team manager it has been hard for me coordinating the team etc, mostly because I lack the tool most commonly used in the real world...Money..haha When I worked as a manager as various companies, it would be simple to control people using tools like commission and work hours etc, but here that tool seems to be non-existent.

Our team structure is that we have a marketing team, engine/power/drive line team captain, chassis suspension captain, and electronics captain.

The biggest problem however is motivating the students. We know that all of the students have joined have a common interest in motorsports and that they are commited to the cause, but it always seems as if they have something else as a priority. Of course this isn't the case for many members as I have some team members who spend day and night pondering about how to build the car. How do you guys get around to motivating your members? How do you spend your winter/summer vacations?

Also regarding marketing/sponsorship, it seems as 70% of our operations seem to be revolving around acquiring resources and sponsors, seems this portion of the program is much larger and "heavier" than the technical aspects...is this a stable approach to management or should more man power be allocated to technical problems?

Biggest question however, is..how do you train your freshman??? I'm sure not everyone joins the team as pro mechanics, and you guys must have some way of distributing your skill and professional know-how to the newbies, how do you do this? Our team has 17 freshmen...no sophs juniors or seniors...so I'm glad we have a team full of very promising members, but I was wondering how you manage the learning process.

Also, should management be involved in the technical areas as well? Or is this inefficient? I'm sure some degree of specialization is required no matter what field it is, but I just have no idea to what degree we should encourage specialization.

Thanks so much guys!!

[MalcolmG]

This is something I'm sure that virtually every team goes through, I know that the way our team is run and how we recruit has undergone a lot of changes through the last few years. Has it gotten better? Well I think so. Is it perfect? Nowhere near it, but we just have to keep working on it.

Anyway, to prevent confusion I'll note that we work basically to the calendar year, as our university year is March to November, and the Australian event that we build for is in November/December.

So basically every year our team has run (since 04) the team has done some sort of recruitment drive and then taken applications to join, followed by interviews of potential new members. We've made efforts toward deciding what kind of people are the type who tend to get really involved, and be the most useful members. Really I think that choosing the right people from the beginning is critical. A couple of the things we identified as being important traits are
- Being the kind of person who tends to really commit themselves and excell at what they do. For this we usually ask about prior experiences with hobbies, sports etc to find out if they have a history of becoming so involved with something that they basically make that their life. This is something that nearly all of our senior members have in common
- Not necessarily academics, but naturally quite intelligent/find uni easy. Once again, a lot of our senior members are like this. It is seen as important because you don't want to have people failing all their papers at uni because they aren't putting enough time into uni, but you also want them to not be spending all their time going to lectures and studying just to pass, so people who tend to just cruise through uni/academic work without a huge amount of effort but still do well are a good sort to have.

Obviously there's always exceptions to those, but they certainly make some good guidelines. Often you'll pick somebody who seems really keen or who has useful skills like being a master welder or something, but they're tits-on-a-bull (useless) if they don't get involved.

Something else we've tried to do more in the last couple of years is to give people a good idea of what they're getting themselves into during our recruitment presentations - this has really helped our attrition rate of new members.

All the above are keys, in my opinion, to building the basis of a useful and productive team. Then how do you take that base and make them motivated? I too have had the dilema where they're volunteers and so you can't force/motivate with money, but something one of our FA's is always keen to point out is that they have obviously joined the team because they want to be a part of what you're doing, and therefore it's perfectly reasonable to tell them that you expect a certain amount of work from them if they wish to remain on the team.

But then if you want to really motivate them and bring them into the core of the team then I think you have to do your best to impress upon them the things that have motivated you to become as involved as you are - the once in a lifetime experience, the huge benefits it will give you in the future, or just how damn cool it is to be able to build a race car that is very technically advanced and of exceptionally high performance etc. It also helps to treat them like humans, make them feel welcome, make them want to be at the workshop, have fun! and they will eventually become addicted, just like you.

How do you train them? I always try to encourage people to learn for themselves, do research on things that interest them etc, but when it comes to some of the hands-on stuff, part of our degree involves doing basic training on a lathe, mill, welding etc, which gives students a good basis, but generally the more experienced team members will assist by giving advice, showing how to do things, supervising etc. We also occasionally have people from industry and from the university come and give safety talks and show people how to use the machinery.

The involvement of management is perhaps a contentious issue. In the last couple of years we've tried to encourage subgoup leaders to spend more time with design and leading the group, while getting those within their group to do the majority of the manual labour. Of course it never works out that way, as the subgroup leaders are the ones who are always at the workshop, and if something needs to be done they are the ones who will do it, but efforts should be made to not let the leaders get bogged down with that sort of thing so that they are unable to effectively manage all the various things that need to be done within their group.

For the senior management - team leader, chief engineer, it's even more important that they don't get too involved with the little stuff. If the chief engineer gets too involved with a design project of their own it can be a lot more difficult for them to effectively oversee all areas of the design, and you can end up with a car which does not have a cohesive set of designs between the different systems and subsystems. For the team leader it is also easy to become too involved with helping out to get things done - sometimes the short term benefits of getting part of the car finished can take precedence over things which seem less critical, such as managing finances, keeping in touch with sponsors, organising things that need organising - but if they're overlooked then the team will suffer in the long term.

I suspect this post has become a lot longer than I intended it to, and I doubt anyone is going to read through it all, but I will throw in my 2c on the marketing/sponsorship side of things too. I think how much time you're going to put into trying to get the resources required to build the car needs to be decided early on in your designs. It's not easy, but you need to work out roughly how much money you can bring in with what you consider an acceptable amount of time put into it, then design a car which can be built for that much. If you design a car which is going to cost you say $50k to build, you may end up spending too much time trying to bring in that money. You'd probably be better off designing a $20k car and putting time into executing the design well and building the best car you can for that money. Remember, everything is about COMPROMISE, and learning how to best comprise is in my opinion one of the most important lessons of FSAE.

OK, that's enough, got a car to build http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

[Mike Cook]

Nice post Malcolm. I think you hit a few universal key points.

At Maryland, our class is credited. This is good and bad. You can get work out of people by threatening to give them bad grades. But you also have people that take the class just for the grade with no real desire to be part of the team or anything else. In the beginning this was a problem but not so much anymore. We have a reputation at the school for being the guys that have no lives and all we do is work (of course this isn't entirely true...we can drink too). So this reputation works out really well because it discourages the free loaders from joining and also sets an expectation for the people coming in.

When the year starts out, I'm very adamant about the time commitment and that if you don't put in the time, we won't finish well. This year I'm grading a lot off of time sheets. Every person must put a minimum of 15hrs in a week. So I'm clear about this up front and this kind of sets the tone for the whole semester.

Next, because I think to be successful you need to have a good team atmosphere, we do things non car related to create team comradery and get everyone comfortable with everyone else. This includes running concession stands at sports games, tail gaiting, shop renovation, fixing the trailer and the busted suburban, volunteer work, painting, barbecuing. When your part of a team you don't want to let your team down. This keeps the kids motivated to do work.

Next you have people and a team, but no skills. So, we bring in lots of mentors to help. These consist of a lot alumni, but also other professors at the uni and just random skilled professionals that want to help. I think this is basically where teams make or break it. You can't just have one leader who has to teach everyone, design the car, build the car, etc...too much work. In the last couple years I have really drilled the seniors on our team hard and so now when they come back to help they remember exactly how I drilled them and so they drill the new kids in the same way.

I'm not going to say too much about team structure because I think the structure you choose on is going to be highly dependent on the group of people you have. Our structure changes every year. In general though, we generally have about 10-15 head guys on the team and one team leader and one manager. The team leader is usually the chief engineer and the architect for the car. Each week he gives tasks to the other 10-15 head guys. The underclass men usually follow the seniors around and spend a lot of their time helping fabricate and learning to use the machines. The manager is in charge of keeping us on track, buying stuff, cost report stuff, sales presentation stuff.

The reason I like this structure a lot is because there is one and only one leader. His word is law and what he says goes. In the past we have sub team leaders and this has never worked because its seems like they all point fingers at each other when shit doesn't get done and you can never hold individuals responsible. Also for most things on this car you don't need a sub group to perform, one person can do it. I can go on and on about this but like I said a lot of it depends on the group of students you have and the infrastructure already put in place.

For sponsorship stuff I think it's important to have a faculty member take care of it because he will stay with the team from year to year and keep track of everything. Plus students tend to say retarded things to sponsors sometimes and you can't go loosing a $10k sponsorship for ever because of some bonehead slip up. The most important thing you can do when trying to find sponsors is figure out what you can give the sponsor in return for the money. I mean sponsors don't really care that their sticker is on our car in terms of advertisement bc the cars only run once a year-try taking it to other events like car shows, auto shows, drag races, etc. They do like photos of the car with their banners in front so they can frame it in their office. They do like to hire the best engineers the school has to offer. They do like the tax write off. They do like to drive the car. If it is someone offering you parts for your car, offer to do an analysis of the part and a write-up or an sae paper. I don't think any team should have a problem with raising 20-50k this way. Certainly enough to build a car.

Along with this, we require each student to raise 150$ a year. This encourages everyone to go out and look for new sponsors and it also gives us like $5000 at the beginning of the year when we are broke and need money to buy materials. We also use some of this money to make sure everyone has team shirts.



All in all, none of these things happen overnight. It takes many years to develop this infrastructure. Don't be upset if it doesn't happen right away. Just keep a vision in the back of your head and keep working towards it. That's what I always did and I brought a team that finished 99th place 5 years ago to 1st place.