We’ve done project management before. And we’ve done event management before. But blending both skills, and multiplying the magnitude of the event x 1,000, proved to be quite the challenge!
Newmarket Consulting were over the moon to have been asked to project manage the Where’s Wally World Records 2011 by the legends at the Street Performance World Championships (SPWC). Brilliant, we thought, nothing ahead but weeks of ideas generation, laughing and general nonsense. Little did we know that what in fact lay ahead was weeks of, well laughing and nonsense I suppose, but also loads of hard bloody work!
I (Mitchell O’Gorman, being of sound mind) took the lead as project manager, guided and inspired as ever by Clodagh O’Brien; and from the first planning meeting with Conor McCarthy and Mark Duckenfield from SPWC, I knew this wasn’t going to be a walk in the park. What I had optimistically imagined would be 2 months of sitting around SPWC Towers wearing a Wally suit and coming up with zany ideas, was suddenly transformed into 2 months of sourcing buyers, quality control, sponsor engagement, media engagement, cross-promotions, guerrilla marketing, event management, sales and merchandising, acting, singing and dancing! If you don’t believe me about the singing check this out!
Having never managed an event of this magnitude, and facing into a learning curve that more resembled a brick wall, I had to learn pretty fast to climb. With the expert guidance of Conor and Mark, as well as tonnes of help from the talented SPWC team, we managed to pull off one of the most widely publicised events of the Summer, making the front pages of the national newspapers three times, and the RTE News four times. In total, we managed to get over 10,000 people dressed up as Where’s Wally for events in Dublin, Cork and Portlaoise over 2 weekends in June – the photos and videos
of which were broadcast around the world in countries such as Singapore, Japan, Brazil and even a spot on CBS News in the US!
But there were challenging times along the way, and many lessons to be learnt. Events of this magnitude do not just happen; it takes months of very careful planning, monitoring, reviewing, re-planning and re-monitoring to give the event the best chance of succeeding. We used the Basecamp HQ online project management tool to great effect here, but learned that there’s no such thing as too much planning! And, in event management, it is probably better to err on the side of pessimism, which I found very hard to adapt to. And when things go wrong, you’d better have a contingency plan in place – as we learned to our chagrin when it looked like the rain might wash out the Cork Where’s Wally World Record attempt! Thankfully the sun and the Rebel spirit shone through at the end of the day – but not after some panicky phone calls to anyone with a roof and a capacity of over 2,000 people in Cork City.
Thankfully, for every stressful moment, there were at least twenty fun and inspiring moments to ease the pressure. I did get a chance to flex my creative muscle and help develop some crafty ideas – particularly for the event launch on the Luas and the entertainment provided on the day of the World Record attempts – but it was working with the SPWC team that most inspired me. Everybody there was so passionate about the festival, and so effervescent. Energy levels were helped that by the fact that they are all very young (I was, in fact, the oldest in an office of 10 people at a mere 32 years old!) but the great success of the Where’s Wally World Records was down to their ability to mix excitement with excellent task execution. Having an open plan office really helped maintain good lines of communication between everyone working on their individual but inter-related jobs. My enjoyment of the project was also helped along in that I attended half a dozen meetings dressed up as Where’s Wally, including a TV interview with City Channel’s Evening Show. It’s rewarding to throw yourself with abandon into an environment that you are not entirely comfortable with, and it was a lot more fun than wearing a suit and tie!
In addition to our internal collusion, there was a whole world of collaborating with other creative businesses to get excited about. In addition to working with SPWCs regular contributors, and in particular the brilliant Catapult team, we also collaborated with a hi-res photographer (Con O’Donohue – member of the CreativeD network that we run), software developers, video crews, editing studio (Windmill Lane – also CreativeD members), actors, dancers and of course we worked with the street performers themselves – this whirlwind of creative collaboration amongst talented Irish people is a wonder to behold in full flight.
On Sunday 19th June, looking down from a 12-metre crane on 3,872 record breakers dressed in red and white stripes, dancing happily to Queen’s “We Are The Champions”, I couldn’t help but think “job well done”. Hard work – yes. Lessons learned – definitely. But, as one Facebook fan wrote to us, “it was excellent-super-duper-feel-good”, and not something I’ll be forgetting in a hurry.
