Coach’s Evaluation

This part of your grade is based on feedback from coaches and project partners or clients.

Weekly meetings:

Each group will meet once a week with a coach who will act as a technical resource and will provide pointers on managing the design process. However, the final design authority and the responsibility for the success or failure of the design ultimately rests with your team.

You will also have regular meetings in person or by telecommunication with the project partners or client. The project partner is the person who has proposed the project and is providing support. The project partners or client must be satisfied with the project results.

There will be a teaching assistant assigned to your group. The TA will normally attend your group meetings with your coach, or with your project partners, and is a resource to facilitate setting up meetings, acquiring information and resources, and communication with the teaching team.

At the end of the quarter the coaches as well as project partners/clients will be asked for their comments on each member’s participation in the group meetings and overall contributions to the design process.

Your Team, Project Partners, and Coach

What your project partners and coach can do for your team:

Sometimes a group of designers can become so comfortable with a particular design approach that they fail to realistically assess its pitfalls, or they reject other potentially successful design approaches. You may think that a particular solution is too wild or too far out of your area of expertise to pursue. Your coach and project partners can help you to assess the difficulty of a given approach or help you to locate resources outside your area of expertise. Their collective experiences may also help you to identify potential problems with a design approach before these problems manifest themselves in the form of hardware (as they so often do!). Whether reviewing a design concept, assisting with design analysis, etc., your coach can provide an invaluable “second set of eyes” on your project. Remember that your project partners and coach are interested in helping you succeed, so take any review comments from them in that spirit.

What your coach can do for your team:

Provide Planning and Scheduling Advice: Since your coach has experience with this class, the difficulties of a rather short design cycle are probably familiar to him or her. Your coach has a good idea of where you need to be during the quarter to successfully complete your project. While your coach won’t be able to schedule your project for you, he or she can provide a good reality check on the time that you’re allowing to complete tasks. Additionally, your coach should be able to help you define the scope of your project so that it can be completed on time.

Provide a Link to Your Project Partners: You’ll be dealing with your project partners directly, but please let your coach know if a problem develops in dealing with the project partners. Your coach may be able to help resolve the problem. Please be aware that in some cases, your coach may be acquainted with the project partners, but in other cases, may not.

Provide “Group Therapy:” Some groups encounter problems with group dynamics. While this is not intended to be their primary function, coaches are often called upon to intervene in the event of a group-related problem. Your coach may work with you to resolve a personality or ego clash, to help set group priorities, or to help divide up the project workload.

Please note that your coach is not supposed to function as a repository of technical information relevant to your project. Part of the course experience is for your team to seek and gather needed information.

Meeting with your coach and project partners:

Weekly team meetings will be held with your coaches. It is also recommended that you communicate with your project partners on a regular basis (perhaps weekly) either through meetings at the project partners’ organization if the project is local or by telecommunication (phone/fax/email) if the project partners is out-of-the-area. It is a responsibility of your team to arrange for such meetings/communications with project partners. As you get further into your projects, you may find that your project partners is quite familiar with what you are doing, and a weekly update may seem unnecessary. In that case, make sure to keep the project partners informed of your progress and ask him or her how often they would like to meet or communicate with you. Make sure, however, to meet with your on-campus coaches as scheduled.