Events rarely go exactly as planned, whether during the planning phase or the event itself.

However, it’s hard to adopt a flexible approach when traditional tools like spreadsheets offer linear, list-like thinking. Yet, I’m always very impressed by how some event organisers make everything work. But the reality is that the smoother the event runs, the harder the people behind it have worked! The consequence is that it seriously limits organisers’ ability to generate greater profit margins and take on more projects.

I’m passionate about events and schedule coordination and want to put everything I learn into our early-stage startup.

Here, I want to share what I’ve learned from a 2021 publications by Tom Servranckx and Mario Vanhoucke, two researchers who investigated solutions for scheduling problems in uncertain environments. Sounds familiar?

I’ve used my two decades of event management experience to translate their work to the event industry. But please, help me improve my understanding by sharing your experience too. Deal? Great, let’s get started!

Break Everything Down Into Smaller Flexible “Work Packages”:

Instead of building one large program to cover everything before and during the event, break it into smaller, interlinked blocks called ‘work packages’ (WPs).

Each Work Package (WP) represents a part of the event, like ticketing, catering, transportation etc. Some WPs are “Fixed” – there’s only one way to complete them. While other WPs can have “Alternative” schedules. This means you can pre-plan different strategies to achieve the goal and will be able to decide closer to that decision node.

For example, if you know you must use a certain ticketing provider, you place the related work in one Work Package without providing alternatives. But for the choice of venue or catering, for example, you can consider different ways of approaching this need, so you generate alternative paths that can be selected as time unfolds.

Map Nested and Linked Alternatives:

Whenever a WP offers “Alternatives,” you should also track whether these alternatives are “Nested” or ” Linked.”

• Nested Alternatives are those in which the same objective can be achieved using different WPs.
• Linked Alternatives are those alternatives that, if selected, will have a downstream effect on WPs in other phases of the work. This is something you don’t want to lose track of.

They present a 2-by-2 matrix with examples of all possible outcomes. However, I’ll take one example that describes both “Nested” and “Linked” alternatives and translate it into the context of organising a TEDx conference.

Start by making a decision between selecting the fancy venue that offers a full-service solution or the more budget-friendly venue where you need to take care of all the details yourself. If you select the budget-friendly venue, you hit your first Nested Alternative. You need to decide which type of catering solution to provide, a buffet- or box-dinner. In our example here, this does not affect any other WPs; thus, it is a Nested Alternative contained within this objective.

However, one could consider that a Buffet setup might take longer to process for participants than a box dinner, resulting in the risk of this segment “eating” into the networking time (pun intended). If we had included that, we could have also drawn a dotted line to the WP about a networking session.

Back to the illustration. Once you’ve made the phase 1 decisions, you update your budget and marketing material and move on to phase 2, which is about the stage setup. With the fancy venue, you’ll also be using their in-house Audio/Visual services, but you still might need to ask them to order some extra equipment, hence the “Linked Alternative” arrow to the “Rent SOME equipment” WP. If you’d be using the budget-friendly venue, you’ll need to bring your own AV team and rent and transport all the equipment. However, no matter which option you select, you must run a sound check for quality control. Once this phase is completed, you can start the stage rehearsals with your invited speakers.

My thoughts on this approach as an event organiser:

Looking back at my experience as an event organiser, I know I did exactly these steps (but not as a diagram). In fact, I pride myself on being very good at keeping track of these interdependencies or at least solving them quickly when I discover them. However, the reason why I felt stuck as an organiser and decided to build this software was that I had a hard time growing my profit margins because I was a bottleneck for this work. And let’s face it, once you tackle the big projects, it’s just too much at stake to let your team “fail forward”.

Let me know if you relate.

What caught our attention in this research was the large overlap in concept and terminology with the software we are building. At its core, our solution, MergeLabs, lets you build micro-schedules that are linked together into a “schedule set.” Each schedule can be shared with different stakeholders to communicate the activities. An update in one place updates everything, as they are all interlinked. The groundwork is already there to allow us to add the visualisation features.

Question: What if we could turn schedules into visual playbooks like this?

Would this be helpful for you? Is there a version that could assist you in delegating tasks while ensuring you and your team maintain clarity and prevent errors, particularly those you are certain you wouldn’t make?

As an early-stage startup, it would be so valuable for me to learn from your experience, and I’d appreciate it very much if you’d share your experience, either as a comment, a DM or over a digital coffee.