Managing LTCs

  • Need to allocate teams to a Local Team Coordinator (LTC) through whom communications go to Team Leaders (about Kickstart, Kit etc.) and support them in their role.

Example of email sent to new LTCs in 2017

Thank you so much for volunteering to be a Local Team Coordinator – welcome to the team!

The Ops Manual describes the role in more detail and I would be grateful if you would familiarise yourself with this document especially pages 17 and 18. However, in essence you are responsible for guiding a group of teams through the SR2017 Programme. This particularly includes supporting them to find Mentors either from SR volunteers or from local industry, universities etc.

I have divided the teams up geographically based roughly on where you live, for whom you will be responsible throughout the SR2017 Programme. The LTCs and their areas are:

These are your teams:

So what happens next? I will forward you a copy of the email I have sent to the Team Leaders informing them that they have been allocated a place in this year’s competition, so you know what information they’ve been given.

As applications have now closed for this year’s competition we will be altering the website to register team leader’s interest for next year when they click on the COMPETE button.

I’ve emailed the Kickstart Coordinator the locations of the teams and which you’re responsible for. The Kickstart Coordinator will then get in touch with you to disseminate the information to your teams.

Your next steps: Get in touch with your team leaders to perhaps introduce yourself via email. Await information regarding Kickstart and usernames for Team Leaders. Start recruiting mentors for your teams and maybe meet up at Kickstart for your first social (I appreciate that the geographical areas for which you are responsible are pretty large and therefore meeting up in person may not be possible very often!)

If you have any queries, please do let me know and hopefully as a team we can successfully support the teams to have a wonderful SR2107!

  • Need to monitor LTCs' progress regarding:

    • Mentor-team matching
    • Checking their teams’ progress (to minimise drop-outs)
    • Check teams’ use of user accounts to monitor activity
    • Tech Day organisation

  • Advice to LTCs re. obtaining info/support:

    • From a team's point of view, we should be trying to enforce the following flow for getting assistance:

      1. Ask mentor
      2. Look/ask on forum (interchangeable with 1)
      3. If the forum is not working (no reply or unsatisfied with the outcome) contact their LTC

    • Therefore if an LTC receives an email requesting help with some kit, they should politely guide the team to the forum or their mentor first - they may even find that their question has already been asked and answered.

    • If the team then indicates that they do not wish to make their problem public then the LTC can forward on their query to the relevant person.
    • For kit related queries this is kit-support@studentrobotics.org.
    • For anything else they should do the default of emailing teams@studentrobotics.org.

Attribution

This page is based on work done by Fiona Gillan, originally published at https://github.com/fgillan/sr-team-coord/wiki/Managing-LTCs, which was under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.