Events Organizing
Recently, I organized an event for 25 people from 7 different countries, starting from the stage of “Here’s how much money we have and this is our target group—let’s do💫 something 💫.”
I can’t say I thoroughly enjoyed the process, but in the end, everything went smoothly, and I can definitely add this experience to my track record.
Here are a few things I think are important to highlight:
1. The Plan
You always need a plan, for everything—but especially for projects with tight deadlines and lots of people and locations involved. The plan isn’t there to be followed blindly, but rather to help you think through what needs to be done and in what order right from the start. It also lets you regularly check if you’re keeping up, and if not, what needs to change in your next steps.
2. The Team
Ideally, you should hire or assign one person to manage things like this, and give them someone to assist. If you have to involve more team members, it’s crucial to clearly define who is responsible for what and who does which tasks. Regular check-ins are a must to avoid situations where several people are doing the same thing—or, even worse, when something that should have been done yesterday hasn’t been done at all (and it’s hard to say which is worse).
3. Documentation
At the very beginning, it’s a good idea to review the requirements for project documentation and plan to revisit this issue a few times throughout the process. Otherwise, you might end up needing to collect price comparisons for hotels or tickets for dates that have already passed, or realize that a tender should have been announced for services already rendered.
4. Other People
We had a charming situation where, right in the middle of buying tickets on a Friday evening, the agency manager helping us announced she would be on vacation the entire following week. You could try to meet with everyone involved at the start and ask if they plan to go on vacation, take maternity leave, quit, etc. (since it’s apparently not obvious to everyone that you should give advance notice about such things). Or, you can simply factor the world’s imperfections into your initial plan: always allow a bit of extra time for each process. That’s exactly what saved us in the end.
