Foley Freeze Utilizes Resources to Incorporate Business Plan

By Emily Eisenhauer

Managing an entire robotics team takes a large amount of work, especially since the team has grown to over 60 members. A part of this management includes the planning out of the team and its future.

The business plan is an important aspect of the Foley Freeze since it explains the team and plans out actions for the future. The plan is composed of many different parts all pertaining to a variety of things such as team history, finances and spending, risk analysis, and future plans. The job also requires a number of resources in order to include all of the most important and relevant information.

“The business plan is a living document that is updated throughout the season to ensure it is reflective of our annual goals and provides clarity regarding our strategic direction, implementation processes and team structure.” Says an excerpt of our business plan.

People are great resources for information, especially when so many robotics mentors on the team are past students who participated in robotics at Foley. The number of subteams can cause information to be quite spread out, but it is great to have such teamwork on the robotics team that anyone can walk up to a member of another subteam and ask questions and seek out information. No matter what, there is always someone around who you can rely on for information.

Team archives are also saved in computer files and in spaces in the robotics room containing information and projects from as early back as the team’s foundation year. Many different photographs, past award projects, files, and write-ups can be found there. The media team saves many of it’s past articles, and hundred of pictures are posted on public platforms such as Flickr, Instagram, and Facebook. Some physical items remain as well in storage spaces.

Past business plans also provide a number of much needed statistics from the past and information on what the team should be doing according to prior future plans. Part of looking at previous plans is ensuring that the team has built up or near to the goals set in the past. By seeing that prior goals have been met, new ones may be made in order to build up the team even more.

The Foley Freeze was founded in 2002 and much has changed since then! The female team member population has grown to 32.25% and the team as a whole now consists of 62 members.

Without these resources and the knowledge of people present on the team, the business plan would be nearly inconceivable. The team is able to put together a dense, comprehensible plan for the team so that it can share important information about the team to others and turn the Foley Freeze into a great resource itself.