Category: Project management

In this series I have written about the planning that gets skipped at the start, and the accountability that drifts once a project is underway. This time I want to focus on the end, or rather, what happens when a project does not quite get there, and what is lost when it does not.

The statistics are stark

The data on project outcomes is not reassuring. Research by the Project Management Institute found that only around 29% of projects are completed on time and within budget. The Standish CHAOS Report, which has tracked project outcomes for decades, consistently finds that fewer than a third of projects are considered fully successful.

A separate PwC study of more than 10,000 projects found that only 2.5% of organisations complete all of their projects successfully.

These figures are drawn largely from larger organisations with dedicated project management capability. The picture in smaller businesses, where projects tend to be less formally managed, is unlikely to be more encouraging.

Most projects, in most organisations, do not fully deliver what they set out to do.

Why projects stall in the final stretch

The halfway point of a project is where the energy peaks. The initial excitement is still present, some progress is visible, and the end feels close enough to motivate.

But the final third is harder. The interesting, creative work is largely done. What remains is often the detailed, painstaking work of implementation: testing, training, communication, process embedding, and the thousand small tasks that turn a project output into something the business can actually use.

This is also the point at which the business, having waited patiently for the project to deliver, starts to expect results. Pressure builds. People who have been borrowed from their day jobs want to return to them. Sponsors who have been funding the work want to see a return.

And so, more often than not, the project is declared done before it is finished. A system goes live without proper training. A new process is documented but not embedded. A change is announced but not followed through.

Finishing is not the same as succeeding

This is the distinction that project management theory calls benefits realisation, and it is the phase that most organisations handle least well.

A project is not successful because it was delivered on time and within budget. It is successful because the change it was designed to create actually happened, and the business is genuinely better as a result.

If a new CRM system goes live but the sales team does not adopt it, the project has not succeeded. If a new process is designed but not followed, the project has not succeeded. If a restructure is completed on paper but the working patterns and relationships do not change, the project has not succeeded.

Benefits realisation is the work of making sure the change actually lands. It is unglamorous, it is slow, and it requires sustained attention after the moment of launch when everyone’s focus has already moved on. Which is precisely why it so often does not happen.

Why this matters more in growing businesses

In a large organisation, a project team might stay in place for months after go-live to support adoption, manage issues, and track whether the intended benefits are being realised. There are often formal review points, benefit tracking mechanisms, and governance structures that persist beyond delivery.

In a growing business, the project team is usually the senior leadership team, plus whoever else could be spared. When the project is declared done, everyone returns to their day jobs immediately. The headspace that was devoted to the project disappears almost overnight.

And so the final 10% of the work, the embedding, the adoption, the measurement, gets quietly abandoned. The project is considered finished. The benefits are assumed rather than tracked. And six months later, when someone asks whether things have changed, the honest answer is: not as much as we expected.

Asking the question at the start

The most effective way to improve benefits realisation is to define what it looks like before the project begins.

What does success look like, specifically, 90 days after go-live? What behaviours will have changed? What metrics will have moved? Who is responsible for tracking that, and what happens if it is not happening?

These questions are uncomfortable to answer before the project has started, because the honest answer is often: we do not know yet. But the act of asking them forces a clarity about purpose that makes everything that follows more deliberate.

A project with a clear definition of the change it is trying to create is more likely to get to the end. And a project team that knows it will be asked to demonstrate benefits is more likely to plan for the work of realising them.

The question worth asking

Before the next project begins, it is worth asking a simple question: if we get to the end and declare this done, how will we know whether it actually worked?

If the answer is uncertain, that uncertainty is worth resolving before the project starts, not after it finishes.

The cost of a project that delivers without landing is not just the budget and the time. It is the opportunity cost of change that did not happen, and the organisational fatigue of going through the process of change without receiving its benefits.

That is an expensive outcome. And in most cases, it is a preventable one.

If you are planning a project and want to think through how you will know whether it has truly succeeded, or if you are partway through one and wondering whether the benefits are being properly tracked, I am always happy to have that conversation.

Get Ahead’s team works across the full range of project support, from planning and coordination to delivery and benefits tracking.

Get in touch: fiona@getaheadva.com   |   Explore our support: getaheadva.com

The Operational Edge, Post 4 of 4

I did not set out to build a career in event management. I came from a corporate background in HR and performance, and event planning arrived through the side door: initially something I took on because it needed doing, and gradually something I became good at and sought out.

What I did not expect was how much the discipline of running complex events would teach me about business. Not about events specifically, but about the kind of operational and commercial thinking that underpins any well-run organisation.

This is the final post in a series built around that premise. Not as a neat argument constructed after the fact, but as something I have come to understand through the work itself.

The information timing insight

The most transferable thing event work taught me is deceptively simple: people cannot act on information before they are ready to act on it.

In an events context, this is practical and immediate. Send a delegate their travel details three months before the event and they will not know where to find them when they need them. Send them two weeks before and they will use them. The information is identical. The timing is what changes the outcome.

I apply the same thinking to how I communicate with clients. Not everything needs to be shared immediately. Some things are better held until the moment when they are actually useful. The discipline is knowing the difference, and resisting the temptation to communicate for the sake of it.

What joined-up support actually looks like

One of the things event work made concrete for me is what it means to bring different kinds of expertise together for a single outcome.

An event needs copy written. It needs a logo and a landing page and printed materials. It needs someone to manage registrations, liaise with the venue, brief the AV team, and be on-site when the day comes. None of those things requires the same person. All of them need to work together.

For a client without an internal marketing team, I might pull in three hours of a graphic designer’s time for the branding, write the copy myself, manage the registrations, and bring in additional support on the day. The client gets a complete service without employing anyone permanently. They pay for what they need, when they need it.

That is also, precisely, how Get Ahead works. The model was not new to me because I had already been living a version of it. What Get Ahead provides is the structure, the network, and the matching process that makes it work across a much wider range of business needs than events alone.

What reputation actually builds

My current event clients did not find me through advertising. They found me because someone they trusted had worked with me and recommended me. Several of them were delegates at events I ran for other clients, who subsequently asked me to run events for their own organisations.

Reputation in that sense is not something you manufacture. It is the cumulative result of doing the work carefully, repeatedly, and without making clients feel the effort behind it.

I think about that when I work with businesses through Get Ahead. The support I provide is not visible to their clients. It is not supposed to be. What is visible is the effect: a business owner who is calmer, better prepared, and more present than they would be if they were trying to carry everything themselves.

Why I do this work

I am sometimes asked what the connection is between a corporate HR career, years of running scientific conferences, and being a Regional Director for a business support network.

The honest answer is that they are all versions of the same thing. Understanding what a person or organisation needs to perform well. Building the conditions that make that possible. Getting out of the way when it is working.

The businesses I support through Get Ahead are run by people who are good at what they do. They do not need me to do it for them. They need the operational breathing room to do it better, and the confidence that comes from having the right support in the right place at the right time.

That is what this series has been about: not event management for its own sake, but what the discipline of running complex operations under pressure teaches you about running anything well.

If any of it has resonated, I would be glad to have a conversation. Not a pitch. Just a conversation about where your business is right now, and whether the kind of support I provide through Get Ahead could make a useful difference.

The event planning and debrief framework from Post 3 is available to download at [link].

The three other blogs in this series are:

About the Author

Read more about Suzanne here.

This series has explored why projects stall before they start, when planning gets skipped in the rush to act. But even when a project is well-planned, there is another failure mode that is just as common, and just as avoidable. It is the question of who, exactly, is responsible for making it happen.

The accountability assumption

In a small team, a lot goes unsaid. That is often a genuine strength. Growing businesses move quickly precisely because there is less bureaucracy, fewer sign-offs, and a higher degree of mutual trust and understanding between the people involved.

But that same informality creates a particular kind of risk in project work. When responsibilities are assumed rather than agreed, when everyone believes someone else has picked up a task, and when the shared understanding of priorities turns out not to be shared at all, projects begin to drift. And often nobody notices until the drift has become a delay.

This is not a problem that only affects large organisations with complex hierarchies. In many respects it is more acute in smaller businesses, precisely because there are fewer people, roles are less defined, and the assumption of alignment runs deeper.

We’re a small team, we know what we’re doing

One of the most common things I hear at the start of a project in a growing business is some version of: we do not need a lot of process, we all know each other, we communicate well.

And it is usually true, as a general description of how the business operates day to day.

But a project is not day-to-day operations. It is a temporary, specific piece of work with its own timeline, its own dependencies, and its own demands on people who are already busy doing other things. The informal communication that keeps the business running smoothly is not the same as the structured accountability that keeps a project on track.

When those two things get confused, the results are predictable. Tasks sit in the gap between people, each assuming the other has picked them up. Decisions that need to be made wait for a conversation that never quite happens. Priorities shift without the project team being told, because nobody formally owns the communication.

The priority problem

There is a related assumption that is equally dangerous: that everyone involved in a project has the same view of how important it is, relative to everything else they are doing.

In a growing business, most people are operating at or near full capacity. When a project is added to someone’s existing responsibilities, it competes with work that has immediate, visible consequences if it is not done. The project, by contrast, has a deadline that feels further away, and consequences that are less immediate.

Without an explicit conversation about priority, and without someone actively managing the project’s claim on people’s time, the project tends to lose that competition. Not because anyone decides to deprioritise it, but because the day-to-day always feels more urgent.

This is how projects that everyone supports in principle end up being the thing that everyone is too busy to move forward in practice.

The cost of assumed alignment

The damage done by unclear accountability is often invisible at first. The project appears to be moving. People are attending meetings, tasks are being discussed, progress is being reported.

But underneath the surface, the gaps are accumulating. Actions from the last meeting have not been completed. A decision that was discussed has not actually been made. A dependency that was flagged has not been resolved.

By the time this becomes visible, the project is weeks or months behind, and the effort required to recover is significantly greater than the effort that would have been needed to prevent it.

What clear accountability actually looks like

Clarity on accountability does not require a formal project management framework or a dedicated project manager. But it does require a few deliberate habits that smaller businesses often skip in the interest of moving quickly.

It means agreeing, explicitly, who owns each workstream, and what that ownership means in practice. It means documenting decisions and actions, not to create bureaucracy, but because undocumented decisions tend to be unmade decisions. It means having a regular, structured touchpoint where progress is reviewed against commitments, not just discussed informally.

And it means someone taking responsibility for the project as a whole, not just their piece of it. In corporate settings that is the project manager’s role. In growing businesses it can be anyone, but it needs to be someone.

The value of an outside pair of eyes

One of the things external support does particularly well in project work is providing the neutral accountability that internal teams find difficult to sustain.

When everyone involved in a project is also running the business, it is genuinely hard to hold each other to account without it feeling personal. An external coordinator does not carry those dynamics. They can ask directly whether an action was completed, whether a decision has been made, whether the timeline is still realistic, in a way that keeps the project moving without damaging the relationships that the business depends on.

Accountability does not have to be uncomfortable. But it does have to exist. And in many growing businesses, ensuring it exists is one of the most valuable things an experienced outside hand can provide.

If you are running a project and finding that accountability is slipping, or if you are about to start one and want to make sure it does not, I am happy to talk through how the right support can help.

Get Ahead’s team works across the full range of project support, from planning and coordination to delivery and benefits tracking.

Get in touch: fiona@getaheadva.com   |   Explore our support: getaheadva.com

The Operational Edge, Post 3 of 4

Most businesses treat the end of a project the same way. Relief that it is over. A brief internal conversation about what went well. A vague intention to do things differently next time.

Then next time arrives and nothing is different.

The post-event debrief is the stage of event management that most organisations compress or skip entirely, usually while still running on adrenaline and the relief of having got through it. It is also the stage that compounds the value of everything that came before it.

Two kinds of review

There is a version of the debrief that most people recognise and most people avoid. It is the one that feels like a post-mortem: what went wrong, whose fault was it, how do we make sure it doesn’t happen again. Even when framed constructively, it is uncomfortable.

The debrief I run is different in purpose, though not in structure. The question is not what went wrong. It is what did we learn. Those two questions produce completely different conversations.

The first looks for problems to fix. The second looks for patterns to carry forward, improvements to embed, and things that went well that need to be protected rather than allowed to drift.

What the debrief actually looks like

Within two to three weeks of any event, I sit down with my client to review four things: the numbers (delegate attendance against target, revenue against budget), the logistics (what worked, what created friction, what we would handle differently), the feedback gathered from delegates, and ideas for next year.

That last category is the one most people underestimate. Capturing ideas for the following year while they are still fresh is not about planning too far ahead. It is about not losing the thinking that happens in the room but never makes it into the formal record.

I keep a running note system throughout every event, logging observations in real time as they arise. Not problems necessarily, just things worth revisiting. By the time I sit down for the debrief, I have a physical record of things I noticed on the day that would otherwise have faded. Small details, things a delegate mentioned in passing, moments where something worked better than expected. All of it goes into the conversation.

The small things that last longest

A few years ago, a delegate mentioned to me in passing that the event lanyards only had names printed on one side. When they turned around, as they always do, the name became invisible. Scanning badges, making introductions: small frictions, repeated throughout the day, across every delegate.

I fixed it. Every event I have run since has had names printed on both sides.

Recently, a director at one of my events specifically thanked me for it. He had noticed. He had no idea it had come from a delegate comment several years earlier. He just knew it was a detail that had been thought about.

That is what the debrief builds over time: a layer of small, considered improvements that accumulate into an event that feels genuinely well run, rather than just well intentioned.

Listening over assuming

There is a version of the debrief that confirms what you already believed. And there is a version that challenges it.

A client had been talking for some time about growing their annual event. Bigger venue, more delegates, exhibitor space. The assumption was that bigger meant better, and that attendees would welcome the change.

Throughout the event I had been talking to delegates, gathering feedback in conversation rather than through formal surveys. The picture that emerged was the opposite of the assumption. People came back year after year specifically because of the size. The conversations were good. They met people they actually wanted to meet. They could not have done that at a larger event.

That feedback shaped the following year’s planning in a way that no survey would have captured, because it came from the right conversations at the right moment, listened to and recorded rather than assumed away.

What this means for your business

The debrief habit is not just for events. Any significant project, campaign, or period of change in a business deserves the same treatment: a structured review, conducted while the detail is still accessible, with the explicit goal of carrying forward what was learned.

What makes it hard to build as a habit is the same thing that makes it valuable: it requires you to stop, at the exact moment when the instinct is to start the next thing.

The investment is a few hours. The return is a compounding improvement in how you work, built gradually, across every project that follows.

The final post in this series draws the thread together: what event management taught me about growing a business, and why the operational thinking I built over years of running conferences is the thing I bring most directly to the clients I support through Get Ahead.

If you would like a practical starting point for planning and reviewing your own events, I have put together a simple framework covering all six phases from commissioning through to debrief. You can download it below.

Our Event Planning Framework

If you would like a practical starting point for planning and reviewing your own events, I have put together a simple framework covering all six phases from commissioning through to debrief. Do let me know if you find it useful.


The Operational Edge: Event Planning and Debrief Framework

About the Author

Read more about Suzanne here.

In my last piece, I wrote about the missing keystone in change projects: the coordination layer that so often determines whether a programme moves or quietly drifts. Today I want to go one step further back, to the moment before any of that coordination begins.

Because in many cases, the real problem starts even earlier.

The pull towards doing

There is a particular kind of pressure that exists in smaller businesses. It is the pressure to be seen to be moving.

When a decision gets made, a new system, a process change, a restructure, the instinct is to start immediately. To assign tasks, hold a kick-off, begin. Planning can feel like a delay. A luxury. Something larger organisations do because they have the time and the people, but not something a growing business needs to spend weeks on.

I understand that instinct. In fast-moving businesses, momentum matters, and stopping to plan can feel like losing it.

But in my experience, both in large-scale corporate programmes and in the work I do with growing businesses across Yorkshire, skipping the planning phase does not save time. It borrows it, at a very high rate of interest.

What planning actually means

When I was working in Sales and Operations Planning at Morrisons, the entire discipline was built around one idea: before you commit to doing something, you need to understand what it will actually require.

Not in theory. In practice.

What are the resource implications? What does it cost, fully, not optimistically? Who is affected, and how? What has to stop, or slow down, in order for this to happen? What does success actually look like, and how will you know when you have reached it?

These are not complicated questions. But they are uncomfortable ones, because answering them honestly sometimes means adjusting the scope, the timeline, or the ambition of a project before it has even begun.

In large organisations, there are people whose job it is to ask these questions. Project managers, finance business partners, operational planners. They slow things down deliberately, because they know what happens when those questions do not get asked.

In most growing businesses, nobody has that role. And so the questions do not get asked, or they get answered quickly and optimistically, in a meeting where everyone is already committed to the idea.

The compounding cost of under-planning

The consequences show up later, and they compound.

A project scoped without proper resource planning runs out of capacity halfway through. A budget set without understanding the full cost of change gets exceeded before the hard work has even started. A timeline built without accounting for business-as-usual pressures slips, then slips again, until the original deadline becomes a source of embarrassment rather than a milestone.

And because the planning was not done at the start, each of these problems has to be solved in real time, under pressure, by people who are already stretched.

The project that was supposed to reduce the load on the leadership team ends up adding to it.

Why this happens more in smaller businesses

It would be easy to frame this as a discipline problem, as though business owners simply need to slow down and think more carefully. But that is not quite right.

The real driver is structural. In smaller businesses, fewer people are involved in any given decision, and roles are often less clearly defined. There is no one whose specific job is to challenge the plan before it becomes a commitment. The person who had the idea is often also the person leading the project, which makes it psychologically difficult to pump the brakes.

There is also a resource tension that is different from the corporate environment. In a large organisation, a planning phase has dedicated time and people attached to it. In a growing business, planning competes directly with the day-to-day work of running the business. It rarely wins that competition.

So projects begin underprepared, not through carelessness, but through a combination of pressure, structure, and the very real demands of keeping everything else moving at the same time.

What good planning looks like in a growing business

The answer is not to import a corporate planning process wholesale. That would be its own kind of mistake: too slow, too formal, and disconnected from the pace at which smaller businesses actually operate.

But there is a middle ground. A planning phase that is proportionate, practical, and focused on the questions that genuinely matter before work begins.

At minimum, that means being clear on scope: what is in this project, and what is deliberately out of it. It means understanding the resource picture honestly, who is doing what, alongside what else, and whether that is actually feasible. It means having a realistic view of cost that accounts for the indirect and hidden implications of change, not just the headline numbers. And it means agreeing what done looks like before anyone starts moving.

None of that requires a planning department. But it does require someone to hold the space for those conversations, and to keep holding it when the urge to just get on with it becomes hard to resist.

The value of an outside perspective

One of the things I find most useful when working with clients on change projects is simply being the person who asks the uncomfortable questions at the start.

Not to slow things down for the sake of it. But because I have seen enough projects, both at scale and in smaller businesses, to know which questions, left unanswered, tend to cause the most damage later.

An external perspective also helps with a problem that is surprisingly common in owner-led businesses: the difficulty of challenging your own assumptions when you are also the person most invested in the outcome.

Good planning is not pessimism. It is the work that makes everything that follows more likely to succeed.

Before the doing, the thinking

The urge to do is understandable. In growing businesses especially, action feels like progress, and planning can feel like its opposite.

But the projects I have seen succeed, at every scale and in every sector, share a common characteristic. Someone, at the beginning, made the time to ask the hard questions. To understand what the project would actually require. To make the plan before making the commitment.

That step does not guarantee success. But skipping it makes failure significantly more likely.

And the cost of going back to do the planning that was not done at the start, once a project is already in motion, already over budget, already behind, is always higher than doing it properly in the first place.

If you are approaching a change project and want to make sure the planning is solid before work begins, I am always happy to have that conversation.

Get Ahead’s team can support the full planning phase, from scoping and resource planning to cost modelling and stakeholder mapping, as well as the delivery that follows.

Get in touch: fiona@getaheadva.com   |   Explore our support: getaheadva.com

The Operational Edge, Post 2 of 4

Events have a way of expanding to fill all available time. That is not a criticism of events. It is a structural problem with how most businesses approach them.

The issue is rarely that running an event is too difficult. It is that the wrong people end up running it. And when the wrong people are managing the logistics, the right people stop doing what they are actually there to do.

The question that has to come first

Before any venue is booked or speaker is confirmed, there is one question that determines whether an event will be worth the investment: why are you running it, and how will you know if it worked?

I have seen events drift badly because nobody agreed this upfront. Marketing runs with enthusiasm. The original commercial objective gets diluted. Nobody is quite sure, afterwards, whether the event was a success or not, because nobody agreed what success looked like at the start.

This is the first conversation I have with any client. Not what do you want, but why do you want it. Delegate numbers. Leads generated. Relationships deepened. Profile raised with a specific audience. Agreeing this at the commissioning stage is what makes every subsequent decision easier, and what gives you something meaningful to review in the debrief.

The mistake that costs the most

A client I work with is now in its fifth year of running an annual conference. I did not run the first year. They did, using their own marketing and business development team.

They swore never to do that again.

Not because the event failed. It did not. But their business development team, the people whose job is to build relationships and convert conversations into business, spent the event day running logistics. Checking people in. Managing the catering. Pointing delegates to the right room. None of that is what a business development team is for.

The event happened. The return on the event did not.

The real cost of running an event yourself is rarely whether it goes smoothly. It is your best people doing the wrong job at exactly the moment when doing the right job matters most.

The decisions only you should make

There are things in any event that should not be delegated. Agreeing the budget and who has final sign-off. Deciding why the event is being run and what a successful outcome looks like. Choosing the format and the audience. These are strategic decisions that belong with whoever owns the commercial objective.

Everything else is operational. Venue liaison, delegate communications, logistics, supplier management, on-site coordination: all of it is delegatable. More than that, it needs to be delegated if the people who should be working the room are going to be free to do so.

What trust looks like when it builds

One of the most meaningful moments in a long client relationship came at the end of an event I had been running annually for several years. The director who had commissioned the work thanked his team, then mentioned, in passing, that he had had nothing to do with the event that year. He had simply arrived as a delegate.

He said it as a compliment.

In the early years of our working relationship, he had been closely involved in every decision. He wanted to understand the process, check the detail, stay across the logistics. That is entirely reasonable when you are entrusting something important to someone new.

By year three, we had developed a shorthand. If I swapped two speaker slots the day before, I sent him a brief note. No explanation required. He had enough experience of how I worked to know that if I had made a change, there was a reason for it.

That level of trust does not come from a contract. It comes from consistently doing what you say you will do, communicating only what the other person actually needs to know, and not creating work for them when the situation does not require it.

What this means for your business

Owner-led businesses often underestimate how much they are carrying themselves. Not because they have not thought about delegation, but because explaining something and managing someone else doing it can feel like more effort than doing it themselves.

Sometimes that calculation is right. For routine, low-stakes tasks, perhaps.

For an event, it is almost never right. The preparation required to brief someone properly is an investment that pays back on the day, when your commercial team are free to do what they are actually there for.

The next post in this series takes a slightly different angle: not what happens during an event, but what happens after. Specifically, the debrief most businesses skip, and why skipping it costs more than it saves.

The first post in this series, which discusses the planning required for a successful event, is here.

About the Author

Read more about Suzanne here.

There is a moment at every event I run when I stop. Not because everything is done, but because everything that can be prepared has been prepared. From that point, my job is simply to watch, and to troubleshoot if something needs it. If I am running around, something has gone wrong.

That stillness is the product of weeks of work that nobody attending the event will ever see.

I have been running conferences and events for a long time, from one-day pitch events through to three-day residential programmes, in the UK and overseas. The thing I have learned, repeatedly, is that what makes an event feel effortless to the people attending it, is never actually effortlessness. It is structure. Structure built far enough in advance that by the time the doors open, every question that could have been asked has already been answered.

This is the first post in a series about what senior event management teaches you about running a business well. Not because events and business are the same, but because the operational disciplines overlap more than most people expect.

It is a bit like planning a wedding

The shape of event preparation is something most people recognise even if they have never organised one professionally. There is a lot to do at the beginning: agree dates, book a venue, find speakers, build a budget and try and think of all the logistics that will be needed. Then there is a quieter middle period, leading to the final few weeks where everything intensifies again.

Those last weeks are the hardest part of the whole process. Dietary requirements, accommodation logistics, which delegates are arriving on which day, whether a speaker is planning to update their slides at the last minute. The sheer density of detail is precisely why the planning that came before it matters so much. If the foundations are not solid, the final weeks break you.

The same shape applies to almost any significant business project. A product launch, a client proposal, a period of rapid growth. The visible work is at the end. The invisible work is what determines whether the visible work goes well.

Stop getting caught out by the same thing twice

Early in my events career, a venue asked me whether any of my delegates had access requirements. I had not thought to ask. I had to contact everyone again, after the fact, to find out.

That has not happened twice.

Now I use proforma logistics emails for every category of attendee: speakers, session chairs, exhibitors, delegates. They have been created over years, refined every time I was caught out by something I had not anticipated. Whatever event I am running, I adapt them. But the foundations are already there, because I built them once and I maintain them.

The same principle applies to anything that gets handled on the fly when it should not be. For the first two years I ran events, I managed the microphone logistics in my head, allocating mics as I went. Then I asked myself why I had not simply written a one-page mic and speaker plan and handed it to the AV team at seven in the morning. I did. They never need to ask me anything about it again. They know exactly what they are doing. So do I.

The goal is not more process for its own sake. It is to remove yourself as a bottleneck. When everyone on site has the information they need to do their job, you are free to do yours.

Walk the journey before anyone else does

One of the first things I think about for any event is not the programme or the venue layout. It is the experience of arriving.

If someone is flying in from the United States to a venue in rural Cambridgeshire, they need to know which station to use, which taxi firms operate in the area, and whether there is anywhere nearby to eat the night before the event starts. None of that appears in the conference agenda. None of it is particularly interesting. All of it matters to the person arriving.

I put this into a single page of local information that goes to every delegate in advance. It answers the questions before they are asked, which means nobody arrives flustered, and I do not spend the morning helping people stuck at a rural station unable to get a taxi that needed to be pre-booked.

Thinking about your customers’ experience from their perspective, not yours, is one of the most useful habits senior event management creates. What do they need to know, and when do they need to know it? Not what is convenient for you to send.

The contingency you never have to use

A few years ago I was running a two-day event at a science park. There was a pre-event drinks reception the evening before, and the only realistic dinner option locally was a small village pub. Seventy-five delegates, one pub, no advance notice: a problem waiting to happen.

Before the event, I contacted the pub. I explained the situation, negotiated a simplified menu they could manage at short notice, and made sure I was there on the night to manage the flow. The first year, sixty-five people turned up for dinner. The pub coped. None of the delegates had any idea there had been a plan behind it.

That arrangement is now a fixture of the event’s annual programme. We have a standing relationship with the pub. Guests assume it was always that easy.

Operational planning is, in large part, the work of finding the single points of failure in advance and quietly defusing them. Not every contingency gets triggered. The ones that do not are the ones you planned for.

On the day, your only job is to do nothing

This is the principle I come back to more than any other, and the one that most surprises people when I talk about it.

When an event is running well, I am not busy. I am present, attentive, and available. I carry one folder with me throughout: the full delegate list, all dietary and accommodation details, and a supply of blank Post-it notes. If something needs my attention while I am in the middle of something else, I write it on a Post-it and come back to it at the next natural break. Nothing gets forgotten. Nothing interrupts the flow of what is happening around me.

This is not a relaxed state. It is a deliberate one. Every task I assign to myself on the day is a task I cannot drop if something more urgent arises. So I assign myself none. The event organiser is not there to man a desk, set out chairs, or manage the registration queue. Those things need to have been handled, or delegated, before the day starts.

If I am running around, the planning was not thorough enough.

What this means if you are running a business

I am not suggesting that running an owner-led business is the same as running a conference. It is not.

But the underlying discipline is transferable. The businesses I work with often carry more operational detail in their heads than they realise, make decisions on the fly that could have been systematised, and arrive at conversations underprepared because the preparation felt disproportionate to the task. It never is.

Operational rigour is not bureaucracy. It is the thing that protects you when something unexpected happens, and something unexpected always happens. It is also, done well, the thing that lets you be calm when it does, because you have already done the thinking.

The next three posts in this series go further: into how to delegate without losing control, into the post-project review most businesses skip, and into what all of this means for growing a business with the right people around you. But it starts here, with the planning nobody sees.

About the Author

Read more about Suzanne here.

Why SME Projects Often Stall, And the Missing Piece That Makes Them Work 

I spent nearly two decades working in supply chain and project management at Morrisons. In that time, I was part of projects most people would find genuinely daunting: integrating the Safeway business after the acquisition, implementing Oracle across manufacturing sites, and building new supply chain teams from scratch. 

What I learned from those experiences – and what I see confirmed every week in my work with SMEs across Yorkshire – is this: the biggest risk to any change project rarely lies in the strategy. It lies in the structure around it. 

Specifically, in what’s missing from it. 

The moment every growing business recognises 

There comes a point in the life of most growing businesses where change stops being optional. 

A new CRM system needs implementing. An operational process needs redesigning. A reporting framework needs rebuilding. A new service line needs launching with proper structure behind it. 

These projects are sensible and often genuinely important. The leadership team agrees the objective. The budget is broadly understood. Someone is asked to lead it. 

And then, quietly, something happens. 

The project slows. Decisions drift. Tasks get started but not completed. Months pass, and the business finds itself asking the same question it was asking at the beginning: why hasn’t this moved forward? 

What large organisations know, and that SMEs rarely have 

When I was part of the Safeway integration, the project didn’t succeed because the strategy was brilliant. It succeeded because there was an entire infrastructure of people keeping it moving – project managers, operational coordinators, finance oversight, communications leads, administrative support. 

Each of those roles played a small but essential part. They weren’t the headline act. But without them, nothing would have come together. 

In most SMEs, those roles simply don’t exist. 

Instead, the project sits alongside everyone’s existing responsibilities. A director sponsors it. A manager contributes when they can. A supplier delivers their specific piece. Individually, everyone involved is capable. But the connective tissue that holds the whole thing together is missing. 

The keystone nobody talks about 

In architecture, a keystone is the single stone at the top of an arch that holds everything else in place. Without it, the structure collapses – not because the other stones aren’t solid, but because there’s nothing binding them together. 

SME projects have their own version of the keystone. It’s rarely the most visible part of the work. It’s the unglamorous, practical coordination layer that makes everything else function. 

It’s the person who orchestrates the meetings and keeps momentum between them. The one who translates a good idea into a clearly articulated operating model that everyone can actually follow. The one tracking actions, chasing progress, making sure decisions are documented and communicated before they get lost in someone’s inbox. 

It’s budget and resource tracking that’s genuinely up to date. Stakeholder management that keeps everyone aligned as the project evolves. The discipline – quiet but essential – of making sure that the right things happen at the right time. 

None of these tasks feel like “the project.” But without them, the project doesn’t really happen. 

This isn’t a leadership problem 

I want to be clear about something, because I see it misdiagnosed all the time. 

When SME projects stall, it’s rarely because the leadership is weak or the vision is flawed. It’s a structural consequence of growth. Most SMEs don’t have the scale to employ dedicated project teams for every piece of change work. Most senior people are already running the business day-to-day, at full capacity. 

The strategic thinking exists. The expertise exists. The intention exists. What’s missing is the operational structure that keeps everything moving – and that gap doesn’t close by itself. 

Where the right support changes everything 

This is where external support – the right kind – makes a real difference. 

Not consultants who produce a report and disappear. Practical, operational people who understand how change actually works – and who can step in to provide the coordination layer that most SME projects lack. 

At Get Ahead, this is something we see first-hand. Every project is different, and every business has its own pressures and priorities. But the pattern we return to again and again is the same: once the missing glue is in place, projects that were drifting suddenly regain momentum. Not because the strategy changed, but because the structure around it finally exists. 

The support might look like project coordination and orchestration. Process mapping and operating model design. Communication and stakeholder management. Budget and resource tracking. Sometimes it’s simply someone who makes sure things actually happen – consistently, at the right time, without the business owner having to carry all of that themselves. 

Change doesn’t just need vision – it needs structure 

Most SME leaders I work with have no shortage of ideas for improving their business. Better systems. Better processes. Better ways of working that would genuinely free them up to focus on growth. 

The ideas aren’t the obstacle. The gap between idea and operational reality is. 

Bridging that gap is detailed, unglamorous, genuinely important work. The coordination. The communication. The tracking. The quiet discipline of making sure things actually happen, in the right order, at the right time. 

That’s the keystone. And in many growing businesses, it’s the piece that makes everything else possible. 

If you’re leading a change project that’s lost momentum – or planning one and want to get the structure right from the start – I’d love to have a conversation. 

Get Ahead’s team works across the full range of project support – from coordination and documentation to process design and stakeholder management. We provide the glue that makes change stick. 

 Get in touch: fiona@getaheadva.com  

About the Author 

Whatever the size of your business, you should have a business continuity plan or BCP. This will ensure your business can continue in its work, even if problems arise or disaster strikes.

In this blog, we look at why business continuity matters and what should go on your business continuity planning checklist.

(more…)

A while ago, your business was a start-up. But now it’s a scale-up. How do you know? Well, if you’re turning away clients or customers because you don’t have the capacity, it could be time to scale up your business so that you can meet demand. And if you’re already reaching your goals easily, scaling up will give you greater profits as well as a greater challenge.

To ensure a seamless scale-up, it’s a good idea to write a business growth plan. In this blog, we look at how to write an effective business growth plan and what information you should include.

(more…)