Wednesday, August 26, 2015

SL3 Aren

  • Chapter 8: Hunter lists three key steps for ongoing change: foundation, feedback, and friction.  In our FRC team, who sets the foundation?  Who provides the feedback and how?  Who provides the friction and how?
In the past mentors have set the foundation.  Hopefully the team leader will set it next time.  Last year the feedback was lacking, but the entire team, mentors and students, provided it to each other verbally.  Once again the entire team provides friction with our interactions.  
  • Chapter 9: What are the satisfiers that get people to show up to robotics and exert at least minimum effort?  What are the specific motivators that push some students to work very hard for the team beyond simply being present?
Some satisfiers are building stuff, solving problems, resolving problems, Ultimate Frisbee breaks, and of course food.  Some motivators that I see pushing people is we only have 6 weeks, wanting to win, and enjoying what they are doing.
  • Chapter 9: How much "hunger for excellence" do you think we have as a team?  In your view, are we shooting to be the best or trying to just be mediocre?
As a team I would say we are somewhere in the middle. We have different people who want different things from robotics.  Some want to win, some enjoy working, and a few want screw around, but we all want a winning robot.  As a team I would say we want the best robot but don't have infrastructure or work environment to do it.
  • Chapter 9: What will you do this year to help us build community in our FRC team?
I will try to implement Scrum and other methods that should reduce the amount of debating and increase efficiency.  One of these methods is testing many versions and modular assembly scrum teams.
  • *Chapter 9: There is a list of summary bullet points on the last page.  Choose one that you think is most relevant to our team and talk about it.
"Find ways to make people's work more challenging, interesting, and rewarding."  One of the problems we had last year was not enough people had jobs or could work on something.  If we used a scrum board we could have time to test more ideas, we wouldn't have to many people on one project, and all this would happen faster.

Summary: I learned in order to improve yourself and others you must set the standard, get feedback, then provide friction to keep the change going.  Also I learned you should make peoples work enjoyable, recognize good performance, and give everyone a useful purpose to fulfill.

4 comments:

  1. I agree that breaks for stuff like Ultimate Frisbee are necessary and fun, although we need to be careful to limit the time we take on them so we are still working.

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  2. I agree that we need to make people's jobs more interesting because it can get quite boring.

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    Replies
    1. How would we make CADing the whole robot more interesting? Or building gear boxes or wiring the robot?

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    2. Out of curiosity, why do you think that tasks like this are boring? I personally think they are pretty awesome. I wonder what fraction of the team agrees/disagrees.

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