Having trouble getting students on board

joshtargo

Im a FRC/FRC mentor and the CAD lead. The lead designer on each team are still using inventor and basically refuse to switch to Onshape, even though we , as a team, chose that as our official CAD package. Their excuses are unfounded or insignificant, but really they just don't want to go through the struggle to change platforms.

They model and design well, but they are isolated. They don't upload models regularly for others to see or build from.

I also have been trying to have them watch and adopt techniques from the Spectrum CAD organization video, but get pushback on that, and resistance to even have a master sketch of the robot. They have some white board work from week 1, then everyone is working on manipulators, assuming that they can join them together later.

Other students want to help but don't have access to the overall plan, or the latest versions of existing work, so it's difficult to make anything that will integrate well.

I'm getting to the point where I just want to let them carry on doing it their way it leaves other students and mentors out of the loop, and the process is suboptimal.

Any ideas on how to steer the team in a better direction?

Ste_Wilson

Press the uninstall button....

Delete\ move the license file

Nuke it from space. It's the only way to be sure.

Oliver_Couch

This is not a CAD problem, but a leadership/management problem. No idea what an FRC is, but I'm assuming you're involved in a university student volunteer team. You're always going to have to deal with this in life, and volunteer organisations can be more difficult to work with because they have different social structures to a more formal organisation.

However, if you can get through it, it will be a fantastic feather in your cap going into thw workforce. The majority of organisational management advice is focused on business organisations, so that's the best place to look even if it's not always quite directly applicable.

If you can see this as a great learning opportunity and challenge to achieve in and of itself, rather than a distraction from whatever your team nominally exists to do, it'll really help you through it psychologically.

Here's an article from a web search that might help you:

https://cruciallearning.com/blog/how-to-get-your-team-to-accept-change/

joshtargo

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/107748#Comment_107748

thanks you. I'm an experienced engineer mentoring high school students on a robot competition team. I'll read the article, thank you