Our friend Oliver Smith works in construction as a project manager. As I'm called Oliver I'll refer to him as Smithy, I'm often called Jonsey for a similar reason.
Smithy is a dear friend having gone to school with Kate, and one of my best Yorkshire mates. We share lots of interests including playing music and mountain biking. We both played in 'Education' a band who at the pinnacle of their success got played on Radio 1 in the middle of the night by someone standing in who no ones ever heard of. Thanks for that, whatever your name was.
Smithy always talks about 'putting things onto a project footing', semi tongue in cheek.
Smithy, Kate and I sat around our kitchen table trying to make a start. Smithy asked me if I had ever used PowerProject. Being quite aux fait with Micro$oft's output I assumed that PowerPoint + MSProject = PowerProject. Smithy apologised, we were off to a good start.
Smithy talked about workstreams. Kate looked worried. A worksteam is a list of connected jobs, a 'to do' list broken down into sections. One for SITE, one for PRODUCTION, CATERING etc.... The idea is that once you have a workstream you can assign it to someone (or yourself) to do. Time will tell...
Kate has always been a fantastic organiser, and talent used as a teenager in her Mum's catering company. Smithy is a fantastic mediator, once bridging a seemingly unbridgable gap between Jim, Education's drummer, and myself after our first rehearsal where I told Jim exactly what to hit and when, and he came away thinking that I was at best a middle class twat. With some justification I hassen to add. (Jim btw is an important person in the whole shebang and is likely to be incharge of managing the festival site. A man 'who can'. A trait often found in the sons of farmers.)
Kate can hold the whole thing in her head. Unfortuately once we had written down all the aspects of organising a festival it was clear that one person could not. Organising a festival is a MASSIVE undertaking to do well as you can imagine. The thing is that organising a festival for 500 is not that different from organising one for 5000, it just scales up, but you've still got to hire toilets and generators, just fewer of them.
We have a massive document called THE EVENT SAFETY GUIDE published by the health and safety executive. It is the bible of putting on a festival and can be used, according to itself, to put on any sized festival including Glasto style. It has equations for working out how many toilets you need, with some interesting variables and doubtful results. It has been contributed to by The Mean Fiddler and other 'heavy' festival organisers.
We talked about having a agenda for meetings but worried that this degree of organisation might kill off the green shots of interest from 'The Daltons'. Gasp. (more on them later)
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