2024-06-03 Leads Meeting
Daniel Puratich
Alison Thompson
R D (Deactivated)
Nathan Green
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 (Deactivated)
@Smile Khatri
@Hardy Yu
@Georgia Westerlund
@Tong Zhang
@Neel Patel
@Nolan Haines
Bootcamps Looks good?
Are we happy with general member onboarding doc?
There’s a lot of clicking and going to other documents
Is there a way to embed pages into other ones
We want to avoid duplicated information
This is fixable
Ordering
Some things feel out of order
introduce the team before the bootcamp?
set expectations before the bootcamp?
Website stuff
Drafting improvements
Meeting format looks good?
@Daniel Puratich and @R D (Deactivated) updated it and new standard is posted
I updated this roughly from competition performance, any concerns?
no concerns
more pictures
@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 (Deactivated)
There are 3 locations with role information (which is bad):
Documents under: Onboarding
Documents under: Organization Structure
This document: Skillset Levelling Rubric
Roles
list out the roles
list out the
lots of people don’t care?
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
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 (Deactivated) Possible 1 per month onboarding/project architecture explanation
Possibly recorded
@Nathan Green are you up for this
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 (Deactivated) Has this time been agreed upon (e.g. Lettucemeet)?
lettucemeets are good
Do we split gcal for each subteam so members can pick and choose the types of meetings they wanna see?
Someone brought this up to me, would be doable if its desired.
Would be a bit annoying as it’s no longer centralized?
@R D (Deactivated) Is it really that difficult to use eyeball to filter?
@Georgia Westerlund current system is fine
Grant access to flight test coordinator?
they need to send emails for us
in the past they used personal
but ability to book sdc vehicle is nice
PMs and FTC are all on the team for a while
anyone else need access?
@R D (Deactivated) Who/which roles has access currently? Is this recorded?
safety cap = subteam leads perms wise
feedback?
should’ve lettucemeeted it
Attendance?
We are going for a new faculty advisor in which they will help store knowledge over beyond the four year span as well as help us with:
Balancing being competitive at competition with teaching newer members.
Building and maintaining the core set of leads and members.
Selecting which technical projects are worth pursuing.
Derek Wright sent a list of people he thinks will be good.
Leads should review the list and come back to us with who we want to interview. Directors are doing the same
Can leads pick what they care about
Directors will then conduct interviews with people we like who are confirmed interested and come to a conclusion.
up to director choice, leads opinion is minimal?
We want someone who is young and interested, not too busy already, and some technical expertise.
Snuck up on us fast but this is the end of month 1 of summer term
I scheduled these Timings were set as placeholders a month ago
Please adjust timing as needed
Feel free to schedule the ones for next month yourself? Idk what the most optimal system is here
directors handling lettucemeet for every subteam is difficult so i tried to put it more on you guys this time, didnt work out bc poor communication. next month stick with this same thing?
keep doing same thing seems fine
Did not go well.
I wasn’t paying enough attention to the vibes.
Everyone turned out ok in the end but it really.
We not gonna do this type of social again.
Encouraging us to do another competition.
I mentioned we do one a year only and it seems they would prefer more so they can get more exposure which makes sense.
Do we have bandwidth for it?
not yet, hopefully in the future
How much would it cost us?
a lot
AEAC 2023 and AEAC 2024 didn’t have any required actuators
SUAS requires grabber mechanisms in past? lot more difficult
SUAS when?
AEAC 2025
hopefully we do well again?
review AEAC 2025 and SUAS 2025 conops as well for difficulty when released
SUAS and AEAC 2026 ??
Alison against doing both, low bandwidth for it
more comps is more effort
SUAS
1.5k usd
8 people
no food, no housing
visas
june
We have a lot of time to decide so not rushing it
a lot of members like accomplishing competition tasks
team has grown a lot between competitions
not making decision yet
@Hardy Yu to coordinate new FTCs?
two new people
get logistics and flight stuff going to keep flight test program going
@Yuchen Lin doing flight school stuff
Being FTC isn’t too difficult but need to know system
@Yuchen Lin on a session to build the second houston class aircraft
What time works for mech and EFS ?
Lettucemeet
Can we delete all leads and arch meetings during midterms week?
No, some leads wanna meet.
Up to subteam leads instead of being consistent.
Poll for architecture meetings is path forward.
Maxwell
leads LTE project
Tong and Aaron are on stream
voting now to get roles done
unanimous as usual
Daniel to fix roles