Dream Chasers: Making the best off-road vehicles.

Not long ago, I talked to Michael, a copywriter whose son goes to a primary school in Austria, about how 100 parents, students and teachers built and run their school together.

This time, Quire made its way into a university in the United States.

Victor Law, a 5th year student majoring in Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, spoke to me about how Quire has helped him and his team prepare for the annual off-road vehicles race.

“Quire helps us stay on track, and more importantly, makes sure we are delivering the best-quality designs.”
-- Victor Law
Engineering Student at Georgia Institute of Technology

Tell me a little bit about you and your team.

I am the team lead of GT Off-Road, a student led organization that designs, and builds a single seat Baja racing vehicle to compete in the annual Baja SAE competition.

Every year, about 100 collegiate teams from all over the world will come and compete in three different competitions held in different locations. Teams will be judged on their designs, their vehicle cost, and their vehicle performance.

This semester, we are finishing designs for the 2018 competition vehicle, which will first compete in the 2018 Baja SAE Maryland competition, and training new recruits on fabrication techniques.

How did you come by Quire?

In the beginning, we would talk about what needs to be done verbally and get updates of progress through weekly meetings. This was rather inefficient. Sometimes, progress even got lost!

Then, we started learning how to use Trello. But it lacked organizational structure.

Quire was introduced to us by a team member around that time. When the member saw what we were trying to do, he brought up that he had used a solution called Quire in another work setting.

How has Quire helped you since?

With 40 members involved, our team is broken down into various subsystems including suspension, chassis, drivetrain, data acquisition and manufacturing, each responsible for sections of the car.

Quire lets us keep track of our progress visually at any time, and save time in our weekly meetings going over subsystem updates. We can quickly, and easily see who is responsible for what, what are making projects slipping from their deadlines, etc.

Here is an example of how we use Quire: when a subsystem lead assigns a task to a member and whenever the member completes the task, he or she will comment on the task saying finished. Then, the subsystem lead will review the task and mark it as complete if the quality was there. If not, the task will stay in progress until it passes review.

Therefore, not only has Quire helped us to be more organized, but it also helped us ensure high quality designs.