INITIAL THOUGHTS
How can we create the best events possible? How can I pass on knowledge to other employees, to make a more anti-fragile system? Can I just clone myself? What is quality and who decides that? How would I know, if I've been doing it all wrong the past 2 years?
CONTEXT
The startup company, F5 Networking, was in spring 2017 not so startup anymore. After 2 years the company had grown from 10 to 100 employees, working in three different countries and new organisational structures had naturally emerged. Some worked accordingly, others not at all.
The Event Department consisted of a one-woman-army (yours truly), which appeared NOT to be quite enough, for the more than 500 events coming up over the next year.
CHALLENGE
-Too many events for 1 person
-Decreasing quality in events
- Lack of innovation and renewal in assortment
- Poor maintenance in event spaces
- Overworking
- Fragile to unexpected happenings such as illness, schedule changes, supplier challenges and even new, great initiatives.
- Non-functioning communications channels
PROCESS
First trying to answer some of my initial questions and quickly realising that everything I had been doing thus far, had been done with very little knowledge but a lot of intuition. That technique had been working out so far, so I chose to keep on doing that and adding a little research as well.
Together with Head of Product Management I sat down and mapped out the status quo, revealing where and how the organisation was particularly fragile. We also figured out what exactly, the events needed to ensure that the quality matched the vision of the company, also taking future innovation into consideration.
SOLUTION
- Dividing eventmanagement and facility management into
2 separate departments that worked closely together
- 6 new employees in Event Department
- 4 new employees in Facility Management
- New communication channel (Snapchat)
- Flat structure in Event Department
- Common core values across the 3 departments
- Shared platform for to do's