There are a lot of definitions with regards to Event Management. I wanted to add to this voluminous literature by saying my piece on the more than a decade experience of being part of this industry.

For me, Event Management is a the science of planning, organizing, directing, coordinating, motivating and rewarding people or staff to attain the visionary objectives of the event producer or client.

I always believe in the saying if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. This is so true in my numerous experiences. Oftentimes, the margin of success is dependent to the number of details that your plan has in implementing to reality an event.

The top reason a client hired or tapped you is because you are organized than him. Therefore, you have to be organized in its truest sense. For a start, you must have an organizational structure that defines clear role and responsibilities to different key result areas.

There is always a saying, the buck stops here. It means in an organizational structure you must know the person that is responsible for the failure and success of a key result area.

I always delegate to a single person a particular job. I do not subscribe to duplication so that I will know who is responsible and needed to be coached. Also, I found out that when a person knows that he is the main owner of the job he performs well.

I love the saying “A leader of the Orchestra must always turn His Back to the Audience”. For me, a leader must make stars out of the supervisors and staff in an event. He must direct them like the conductor to create harmony and order in what seems to be a chaotic and mission impossible affair.

Directing is crucial and it is an art and a science that best acquired through years of practice.

Everybody in the event should be a great coordinator. A great coordinator is a great communicator. Communication is the key to have a clear coordination. Since there are a lot of elements that needs coordinating, one must work hard, must have patience and persevere when sometimes things are not working out right or a particular supplier or member of the team is not cooperative or simply inept to perform the assigned task.

Events are made up of people. Most of the times, loyalty of the people must be gain in order to ensure that all elements of the event will go well because the people assigned in those areas believe and respect the leaders.

In addition, events are hard to execute, most especially, mega events therefore a great leader is a great cheerleader.

Leaders must reward all member staff that contributed in making the event a resounding victory. Reward is what makes staff enjoy events. In our organization, we eat out; we go out of town, and reward achievers. This activities allow staff to look forward another hard but rewarding experience that is doing again another challenging event.

This is just describing in general what event management is, I will go into details in the coming days about this definition in more scientific and example laden write-ups.