Team Collaboration

Collaboration During Covid-19

If your team is allowed to work remotely during the pandemic- Weekly worknights and worknight meetings are even more important. Get everyone in on a video call weekly to check in progress. Voice channels on Discord can provide a drop-in casual chat outside meetings replacement for working together in a physical shop, house, or computer lab. Having a central CAD repository/PDM system becomes even more important when working remotely. If your team didn't have one before, it's much more important now.

Covid-19 Team Collaboration Checklist

• Weekly worknights (online)
• Weekly meetings (video calls)
• Collaboration Software (See Below)
  • Bonus: Open Voice channels
• CAD Vault/PDM (See Below)

Worknights

Having weekly worknights is key to getting team members to all focus on working on a car together. Starting the worknight with a team meeting is a great way to encourage everyone to show up on time, to have status updates, and to get everyone on the same page. Having everyone on the team see each other work together at the same time is very underrated as a motivational tool, to build trust, and have fun. Sharing the vehicle model with the entire team can help get everyone on the same page and show off the work everyone has been doing.

Collaboration Software

Many teams have started to use slack, Microsoft Teams, discord, or other collaboration software.The benefit of the software over something private-only like facebook messenger is that team members are welcome to join, leave, and adjust notifications based on conversation topic and interest. Especially helpful for getting new members into the conversation.

Slack

Slack brought chat channels to the professional workplace. Slack offers a "lite" version for free, which has less features and limited chat history.

Pros:

• Lots of integrated apps. Including google drive, calendars, and reminders.
• Custom emojis

Cons:

• Free plan only allows access to the most recent ~10k messages. For large, teams this can limit to the past month of messages, which is very bad for long-term knowledge transfer of the team.
• Paid plan is too expensive for student teams.
• No voice channels

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is the newest addition. The development team has added a lot of new features during 2018-2020, which has brought it up to par with the other platforms.

Pros:

• Free with Office 365 if your school has it.

Cons:

• Channels have excessive unnecessary vertical space compared to others, which makes it less like a conversation. However, if your team uses threads properly to create sub-conversations, then this issue goes away.
  
• No voice channels

Discord

Originally branded more towards gamers, discord is likely already popular with gamers on your team.

Pros:

• Free
• Your team probably already has some members that use it
• Has voice channels for casual drop-in conversation and impromptu discussions. You can easily see who else is working on the car at the moment, and hang out with them.

Cons:

• Gamers may need a second account on discord, so you can actually see team members names instead of gamertags.
  

CAD

Having a single source of truth for your CAD files is very important. Every team member should have access to the latest CAD of the entire vehicle.

GrabCAD WorkBench

Pros:

• Free
• No IT System required

Cons:

• Locking files is optional, which can result in conflicting versions.
  
• Encourages syncing of all local files, even if the user didn't intend to make a change to the vault version, which can cause accidental changes and unnecessary revision conflicts.
  

SolidWorks PDM

Pros:

• Seamless integration into SolidWorks
• Requires users to lock out files to work on them to prevent conflicting versions and accidental changes.

Cons:

• Complicated IT system required

3DEXPERIENCE

Pros:

• Dassault is providing free access for students during covid-19.

Google Drive / Dropbox

Works for smaller teams. For larger teams with many simultaneous users, being able to lock out files during editing to prevent version conflicts becomes more important. Also, having one main computer (such as a shop computer) which always has an up to date full-vehicle assembly will help to spot issues.

Pros:

• Free
• Most teams are already comfortable with these platforms for document sharing.

Cons:

• No SolidWorks integration
  
• No ability to lock out files
• File references can become problematic

Inventor Vault

Available for teams who use AutoDesk Inventor as their primary CAD software.

Subversion (SVN)

SVN is a version control system developed for software before git. While git is a distributed system, SVN has one central vault, which users can lock out files for editing. There are hosts for SVN servers, or you can create your own SVN server using software like SVNEdge. All the users would use software like tortoiseSVN to sync files.

Pros:

• Locking out files is optional.'

Cons:

• No SolidWorks integration (yet).
• IT knowledge required to set up own server.

Git and Github

Git is primarily used for software development. It is built upon the ability for two people to simultaneously edit a text file, and then for git to be able to merge these two files. Because of this, users are not able to "lock" so only one user can edit at a time. Unfortunately because merging is not possible with CAD files, Git is a poor option for anything other than text files.

Software Development

Git and Github

Great for software - Git is the industry standard. Central repository for files. Easy to share. Revision control. Setting up a central, team controlled git repository can be difficult. Each new member to the team should be given access to every repository for the team. Otherwise repositories become silo'ed and knowledge can be lost by graduating team members' repositories not getting shared with the younger members.

Subversion (SVN)

Subversion is a central repository either on a hosted service or on a team member's home server. It allows for a central storage location for all files, where the team leads can add students to all files at once. See tortoiseSVN for users and SVNEdge for the server.