A Gantt chart is a key tool for planning and tracking your conference. In its simplest form it works as a schedule management tool that allows to control the milestones and activities related to your conference by tracking the start/end dates and the people directly responsible for each activity.

If you have an engineering or technical background my advice on using a Gantt chart will seem banal but unfortunately in many projects I have seen in the past years, this basic planning tool has been missing. During the last week the Salone del Mobile (or Design Week) took place in Milan and hundreds of events and conferences have been organized all around the city. I have been involved in some of them, specially in the marketing area, and when I asked to see the work-plan of the project the most common answer was “it is all in my head”. It is easy to understand that the risk of having a plan inside someone’s head is that it cannot be shared with others immediately and the amount of complexity cannot be too much.

There are many specific tools for creating and managing a Gantt chart, the most famous being probably Microsoft Project, but for most cases this is an extremely sofisticated software and you can obtain good enough results using a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers or even Google Docs (more on how to use Google Docs’ spreadsheet as a collaborative tool in a further post).

How to createa Gantt chart for your conference using a spreadsheet (like Microsoft’s Excel):

1. Make a list all the main items involved (e.g.: Venue, Speakers, etc.) and milestones (e.g.: Project Kickoff, etc.)
2. Break down each item into the activities required to fulfill it (but keep the level of detail manageable)
3. If possible, order and number each item and subordinate activities in a logical sequence
4. On the horizontal axis of your spreadsheet add the calendar dates from the start to the end of the project
5. Add the start and end date to each activity by filling (with color or a mark) the cells representing these dates. This gives you a graphical representation of the duration of each activity. If you prefer you can add extra columns to specify the starting and ending dates
6. If you manage a group of people, add the name of the person responsible for each task

A sample of a Gantt chart

Once your Gantt chart is ready, make sure you check it out every day to keep control on which activities should be taking place, if they’re on schedule and take necessary decisions.

If you organize conferences frequently, do the extra effort of standarizing your Gantt so it can be easily reused by you or your colleagues.

Each time you update the chart, write down on it the date of the update so that you avoid confusion between different versions.

Share your Gantt chart with members of your team and your superiors. It is important that everyone involved in the project knows the status of his activity and the relationship with the whole entity. Your boss will be relieved to see that you have a methodical approach to the management of your conference and you will also be able to answer faster to his questions on the status of the project. Though it is best to consult the Gantt chart in its digital form (which should be perfectly updated) a printed version helps to see the big picture on how things are proceeding.

I will come back to the Gantt chart in further posts, so stay tuned through the RSS Feed

Here you will find further details and tools to create your Gannt chart:

• David Seah: Manual Gantt charting in Excel
• Excel Gantt chart template
• Create a Gantt chart in Excel

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Any conference is composed by 3 main elements that make it bad, mediocre, good, excellent or memorable. The event manager mixes the right dose of each of them during strategic planning and operations to obtain the desired conference.

Very often a compromise must be reached to comply with limitations in budget, space, time, etc and it is important that the consequences of suppressing something are carefully evaluated: eg. the registration process of the attendees might be slow due to the lack of money to hire more stewards or rent extra hardware but if the content of the conference is outstanding or networking activities are powerful, a participant will forgive such a detail for the benefits he has gained.

These are the 3 elements that make a conference:

A: Basics (taken for granted)

All those indispensable components that constitute the main structure of a conference. The components of A are taken for granted and don’t generate satisfaction on the attendee but a lack of effectiveness or quality in any of them produce dissatisfaction and complaints.

Examples:

• Registration process (length and duration of cueing, easyness of the process, etc)
• Conference room (size, light, temperature, etc)
• Audio / Video (quality, visibility, volume, etc)
• Catering (quality, amount, distribution, etc)
• Support material (workbook, congress bag, pen, etc)
• Basic networking moments or areas (coffee breaks, etc)
• Customer service and information (before, during and after the event)
• Toilets (availability, hygienic conditions, etc)

B: Special effects (make the difference)

These are the ones that transform a conference into a memorable event, one worth promoting between friends/colleagues, that justifies the extra price payed, guarantee the participation next year or make forgive some of the imperfections in the basics. A wise conference planner will spend his creativity and some extra money here.

Examples:

• Innovative solutions that avoid typical conference annoyances (like receiving the event access pass on the mobile phone)
• Advanced communications (free internet wi-fi, live online coverage, etc)
• Special treatment (make me feel like a VIP even though I’m a regular)
• Advanced networking (think of choosing who you’d like meet before attending the event or proximity tools that help people find each other during the conference)
• Catering (extra quality, variety and presentation, etc)
• Exclusiveness (think of TED conferences)
• Recreation (live performers during idle time, etc)
• Style (trendy details recognizable by attendees like a stylish though simple conference bag that you are willing to reuse after the event)

C: Content (no content? no party!)

Content is king! Even having the indispensable elements right and all the special effects of a Hollywood movie won’t save a conference if there is no real/useful content involved… This might not be completely true when networking is the main activity, but in that case it must be considered as part of the content.

Examples:

• It is better to have few but outstanding speakers than a whole bunch of mediocre ones
• The contents of the event are original, a novelty or presented in an innovative way
• You take part in the creation of contents that has the potential to have a strong impact in your environment (like a G20 international summit)

Start your planning from C, get A right and deploy some B to make your event not just good but remarkable! (according to Seth Godin, remarkable things and actions make ideas spread)

In further posts I will list and analyze the components of A, B and C in further detail. Stay tuned through the RSS feed.