- #1
CiscoCertified
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Hey, I know this forum is filled with engineers so I want to really get other peoples opinion whether you should ask your Subject Matter Expert on a team if they are an expert and it is their profession in engineering. For example, I am the project manager of my high school robotics team. We are choosing between wheel based launch method and pneumatics for tshirt cannon. Our more aggressive mentor (who is an IT guy btw), says pneumatics will take longer, is more complicated, and will cost more. My main problem with those concerns is we haven't even brought in our expert in the subject matter. From my understanding in a professional team of engineers you would bring in the foremost expert on the issue before you throw out a design that could end up being better (less time, equal or less complexity, equal or less cost) if you have that resource available (we have a ME on the mentor team). So at our brainstorm meeting he wanted to throw out our pneumatics design without consulting the expert. I put my foot down to do what's best for the team and bring in our expert. Opinions from engineers or physics/engineering majors.
P.S: Our ME is on business leave and I am going to proceed with the two wheel based designs but leave the pneumatics one open if our SME is able to give us his opinion and crunch some ballpark numbers we can then make a decision based on facts and non-bias based on what the SME says.
P.S: Our ME is on business leave and I am going to proceed with the two wheel based designs but leave the pneumatics one open if our SME is able to give us his opinion and crunch some ballpark numbers we can then make a decision based on facts and non-bias based on what the SME says.