It stated in specific terms that we all are open to cognitive biases that lead us to overestimate benefits and underestimate costs.  For event prep this often results in overestimating understanding across our teams and underestimation of how long tasks take.

The best tactics to guard against this appear to be practice sessions.  The dry runs that we perform as teams help us to get peer reviews of our task duration estimations and help build understanding of what the other teams are doing.

Seems a little trite but practice does get us a little closer to perfect.

1. The Team Model – its critical to know who is doing what and what roles they will play.  What are the teams doing work on the event and who are the approvers / stakeholders that need communications.  Having these clearly set out improves things enormously

2. The Run – What are the activities to be done and the order they need to take place in.  What are the estimated timings.  What is the critical window of time that the activities can take place in.  What is the roll-back plan that needs to be activated to get things back to operable if the event cannot take place

3. Support model – a subset of the team model but critical – what are the different levels of support and the ways of contacting them / kicking them off should things not go to plan

4. Dry run – practice makes perfect.  How can you get the right people together to practice the order of events.  This ALWAYS results in some great learnings in terms of how activities fit together, particularly between teams and at major handovers

5. Communications plan – during the event when will you communicate to the teams and how will this be done?  How will simple reporting be conducted when you don’t have the time or luxury to debate this in real time.

I would be keen to get the insight of others on these elements but in my experience having the above nailed down significantly reduces risk when its ‘showtime’.