December 13, 2018: This article is not completed. I have decided to release it because I will work this as some sort of “MVP” / work in progress and will iterate over it during the following weeks. I’m currently working at a startup and my time and energy is being fully consumed in it.

Part II Planning: Goals, and how to handle effective meetings.

Well. I’ve finally decided to finish what I started. I apologize before hand. I don’t buy into excuses, so this is entirely my fault. I’m going to be proof-reading everything and adding things as I see fit.

Let’s stop the chit-chat and dive into the details.

Goals

This is the most important part. You must set goals. Without them, the whole event will never materialize (Believe me, there’s a high chance it’s going to be late). Therefore, (even though it’s some cliché in Project Management), goals must be SMART: Specific Measurable Actionable Realistic and Time-Based.

Every event is different, and you’ll need to incorporate your own. Understand that there are many moving pieces, you’ll have to work with many portions at the same time, even if one depends on the other. For example, you need to know where are you going to host your event, and you need to know what you need (Chairs, banners, tables, consoles, PCs, Internet, etc, etc). But you won’t exactly know what you will need until you have the venue! (This is a real problem).

Which that brings me to the very first question you should be asking:

What’s your objective?

What do you want to accomplish? I don’t mean making an event. When we started PG Arena, we originally wanted to bring proper eSports to our country, The Dominican Republic. Therefore, our main objective wasn’t to just make a tournament, it was to build a brand, bring the community together, and make a proper organization.

Therefore, if you have a higher objective/mission, then you need to develop all the following events with that in mind.

I say this, because if that’s your goal, then you wouldn’t mind much to invest in the tournament, and sustain some losses or generate little net income (Please, understand that you must generate revenue in order to survive, and that’s a topic of its own).

In the other hand, if your objective is to make money, you will end up compromising “add-ons” such as venue location, size, and even the event’s theme (It’s difficult, bro). There’s so much I’d like to talk about, but I’ll leave it for a separate post (The awful reality of Anime and Video Games).

This was our first logo! We asked a friend to help us with the design!

Nonetheless, we wanted more! Fast forwarding 6 months, we started prototyping with different designs! Our lack of expertise didn’t stop us, and we mustered our way through. Here’s how it continues to evolve!

Create a Top 10 list and assign them to users. Add the due date. — That’s goal setting!

After that, you need to make a small list of the top 10 things that need to be done, and assign the task to the person who’s the most competent to make it. (Remember about the team-building post?) This is why it’s important to have a diverse set of skill-set in your team.

These are my Top 10 goals, and by no means these are set in stone. Use them as a guide and add them based on your experience (There’s always something missing…)

As a good rule of thumb, it’s always good to plan 6 months in advance.

Let’s consider that we’re making an event for May 2020 and today is November 7 2019… This is how I’d do it:

1. Define the event’s topic for November 31st 2019 (Games played, and extra activities offered)(Leader)
2. Have listed and studied the different venues for November 28, 2019. (Joe)
3. Have the company/community/organization’s logo for November 25, 2019. (Patrick)
4. Build the event’s budget for November 31st, 2019. (Louis)
5. Design the even’s landing page for December 15, 2019. (Patrick)
6. Have ready the list of requirements (Tools) for December 7, 2019. (Joe, Louis)
7. Have the digital banners ready w/countdown (Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat) ready for December 15, 2019. (Patrick)
8. Have the list of sponsors for November 31st, 2019 (Joe)
9. Had contacted all the sponsors and the venues for December 1st, 2019. (Joe)
10. Decide on a target date for the event… This includes analysis and listings of all the the similar events that may happen around the same time. (You need to be analytical, people will only go to one event, and they usually have money on the 15s and 30s of each month). (Leader)

November 31st is a very special day, isn’t it 😉?

Note: The task list is in no special order.

Where it says leader, the group must triangulate and bounce-off ideas. Let everyone participate in the meeting.

Note that #6 should come before #4… You need to have everything set to build the budget, right? Well, not exactly. At the very beginning your are crossing a big chasm, whose center is filled with a void that you have no idea how deep it is. You may probably won’t have everything ready for the budget.. but it’s a start. Just start, fix as you move, don’t wait for everything to be completed, or you won’t be able to make it.

There are things that you don’t know beforehand because you don’t have them confirmed.

Sorry for the Spanish! These were some of our task list. Note that they weren’t that we didn’t set a due date for each one them! While I highly recommend that they must have a due date. If it goes out of your control, write them anyways, so you know you have those pending. Nonetheless, if you don’t keep tabs on them, they will never materialize. We left some things for the last minute and it almost bit us!

Note from the picture above that we didn’t use any fancy software. Just plain Microsoft Word. Heck, even Google docs would be a perfect fit for it… Have something that is easily accessible to everyone.

Building the Chronogram

Sorry for the Spanish again! This is a Microsoft Project file! It’s not necessary to build a chronogram, but it does help out. Keep it simple at the beginning. Don’t think that you need the fancy tools in order for you to make the event a success… We just happened to have them and knew how to partially use them.

This goes hand in hand with goal setting. The Chronogram is the mapping of the goals into tasks with schedule that contains the estimated time it will require (welcome Project Management) to be accomplished. I won’t go too much into details, but there’s always 2 ways you can look at tasks: from macro, and micro.

Macro focuses on the goals, micro focuses on the tasks themselves. You want to have a balance of both. You want to estimate a time from the macro level that it won’t take more than that, and you don’t want the micro task to take too much. This is cryptic… What I mean by that is that you won’t be able to estimate 100% accurately the time it will take by looking it at the macro level (Goals), but if you let yourself be ruled by the micro (the tasks themselves) you will take longer than necessary to complete them. I’m an advocate on pressuring myself to do more in less time since I’m a strong believer on Parkinson’s Law:

work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion

People lose a lot of time when they don’t focus, that’s why I believe in strict deadlines. Nonetheless, remember SMART, the R stands for Realistic/Reasonable, don’t try to rush things out. Always strive for high quality decision-making. If you think that I’m contradicting myself, I’m not. The message I’m trying to get across is: Don’t waste time.

Map Goals to tasks with Schedule

Taking as an example the goals that I set above, we could do the following:

First we study our list (Note that the list wasn’t in any special order). We prioritize our goals with the one that will have the biggest impact. In my experience there are 4 goals that need to be worked in tandem (at the same time):

Venue, Theme, budget, and date.

Remember your main objective? Well, that’s how it depends on everything else. Depending on the available budget, the venue is going to be affected, the event’s theme won’t be as fancy as you want, and the date will need to move forward as you need to accommodate additional sponsors to cover the costs. This creates a reinforcement loop (Systems Thinking anyone?). The leader should be able to see things in a holistic view: How things connect to each other, and how everything affect everything else. If you have no expertise, don’t worry, make your best guess and move along. You will learn a lot by doing this, and that’s the point!

Another important thing, (This comes from Ray Dalio) what is more important is what you don’t know vs what you know. You need to handle the

Let’s assume we want to build a brand, bring the community together, and formalize eSports in our country. Based on that, we break out our first 4 goals into more tasks.

I’m not going to develop this fully to 100% since this is going to get long… It’s just for the idea to get across.

Some other thoughts

We set an initial budget of $500 (This is between what we have and what we are willing to invest).

I don’t want to go out of topic, but this is important. If you’re starting, don’t try to go big. We did that and suffer the consequences. Do something small that you can manage and get some experience. Then, you make it bigger.

With $500, you won’t be able to do anything fancy… but don’t worry. Based on our experience, people don’t value the venue setting more than the gaming experience. We took so long to realize that… We wouldn’t have spent that much at the beginning, and focus what everybody brings together: gaming.

Then, we put a task to make a list of all the places that we could host our event.

Key Takeways:

1. Define your objective. E.g: Build a brand, earn money, have fun (etc.)
2. Write goals that are SMART (Specific Measurable Actionable Time-bounded). Write a top 10 list and assign them to your team-members.
3. Plan 6 months in advance.
4. If you’re starting, don’t go big right away. Start small (<40 players) and learn