2024-06-03 Leads Meeting

Owned by Daniel Puratich
Last updated: 2024-06-04
6 min read

  • Timing

    • Originally this was meant for 2024-05-27 Leads meeting, however, due to availability and competition travel team break this meeting was moved to June 3rd. Just means lots of topics

  • Attendance

    • @Daniel Puratich

    • @Alison Thompson

    • @Emma Chan

    • @Nathan Green

    • @R D

    • @Smile Khatri

    • @Hardy Yu

    • @Georgia Vachon Westerlund

    • @Tong Zhang

    • @Neel Patel

    • @Nolan Haines

  • @Alison Thompson

    • Full disclosure I had more here but after talking to Smile my opinion was changed

    • In general, on all subteams we need to do better at clearly defining PM roles and making sure PMs know what their responsibilities and expectations are.

      • Personally, I have a meeting with new mech PMs to explain the role, give them a chance to ask any questions they have, and let them decide after that if PM is something they want to do.

    • Some Docs

  • @Daniel Puratich

    • giving PMs access to leads chat to see the staging we’re doing?

      • dont wanna flood leads channel with PMs

    • Maybe rename project managers to be “project leads” then give them access to leads chat and expect them at act more cross subteam rsther than subteam specific?

      • subteam leads can handle projects that are only within their subteam whereas project leads handle projects accross multiple subteams. Both be referred to as leads. Both highly encouraged to attend leads meetings?

      • right now what we have is fine with directors being project leads for major programs is working well

      • keep PMs subteam specific

      • more direct reports to directors will be difficult

    • don’t want to box anyone in

      • expectation would be too high

    • should we add more “senior”, “staff”, “senior staff” type levels to give people a sense of progression in ability without an expansion into management?

      • hard no

      • we don’t use senior members

      • “I dont really understand why it exists”

      • it doesnt rlly mean anything

      • could be based on year on the team

      • can remove it bc unused

      • seniority is generally quite obvious

  • @R D

    • There are 3 locations with role information (which is bad):

    • The responsibilities of senior member, project manager, and subteam lead are vague and overlap, so it needs to be defined with a single authoritative source

      • Project manager:

        • Responsible for architecture

        • Knows what needs to be done (including splitting up the work into tasks)

      • Subteam lead:

        • Ensures projects are moving in the correct direction for programs determined by Director

        • Ensures project managers get the appropriate resources (e.g. equipment, material, slaves members to work on tasks, getting people in contact (e.g. PM: The hardware needs to be mounted, SL: I know who you should ask/I can find out who to ask))

      • Senior member:

        • If the criteria for giving this role is not automatic (e.g. time on WARG), there must be dedicated effort every term to determine which members are promoted to the role

        • I personally do not care about senior member role (even when I was on the team). I see problem→I bring several potential solutions with tradeoffs to meeting→decision made→I start coding. Being senior member or not had nothing to do with it

        • Multiple levels not very useful: Keep WARG non corporate! . Unless it’s automatic (e.g. 2 terms, 4 terms, 6 terms, 8+ terms on WARG)

    • Members are allowed to have multiple roles and take responsibilities from another role

      • Example: A subteam lead can write a feature and have it reviewed and merged

    • Project managers should be dedicated to a single subteam lead

      • Otherwise, the following will occur:

        • Directors are responsible for a varying number of “subteams” every term, including progress tracking

        • Project managers become responsible for resource acquisition on top of managing the project

        • Integration becomes more difficult unless responsibility of which parts of the system (i.e. drone) is made very clear (see SysInt)

      • Exception: The coordinator roles are specifically under Directors

    • Member Development

  • Leverage the 1:many method of knowledge transfer instead of 1:1s

  • Engineering subteams should shoot for a weekly work session, weekends welcome here

  • Will be less flight tests after comp as we go into R&D phase

  • @R D Possible 1 per month onboarding/project architecture explanation

    • Possibly recorded

    • @Nathan Green are you up for this

  • 2024-2025 Program Outline

  • I put some stuff in gcal for next week, are we down?

    • no concerns?

  • Are we doing a VTOL complete architecture discussion?

    • Come up with some goals for our next comp drone

    • we aren’t ready for this

  • @R D Has this time been agreed upon (e.g. Lettucemeet)?

    • lettucemeets are good