Event Managment Body of Knowledge EMBOK origin
Hello - I'm going to talk about the EMBoK, the Event Management Body of Knowledge. I originated it in the year 2000 when I wrote a paper for a conference. What I wanted to do was to develop a framework to describe this new emerging profession of event management. I knew about the PMBOK, the Project Management Body of Knowledge and I knew any profession needed a body of knowledge.
With that in mind I put together a model which was made up of processes, what are called domains and phases. I'll show you that in a second but I should mention this was picked up very quickly by a person called Julia Rutherford-Silvers, a good friend and Janet Landey. We put together a conference in South Africa, courtesy of Janet Landey, and brought in a number of event experts. We decided on the cube I introduced from other professions. The original cube see if I can draw this properly a three-dimensional cube which is quite common for professions. This is a nice visual way to look at it and basically what we said about the cube was that there are a number of domains. Now this was quite a discussion. We decided on five domains: one two three four and five. The domains were:
• Design,
• Administration,
• Marketing,
• Risk, and
• Operations.
Now this was quite dramatic at that time (July 2004) mainly because of this one: Risk. My textbook (Festival and Special Event Management 1st ed, 1999) was the only textbook that actually had a section on Risk. At the time most of the event management books and what people talked about was indeed Design and Operations and Marketing with a little bit of Administration. Now we’ve got the areas and they've called domains i.e. domains of knowledge. But that is not enough because that doesn't really describe the profession. There is something else and that is called Phases. The knowledge you need is different in different Phases. What do I mean by phases? We'll put them down here Phases.
Phases mean different times. You have the Initiation Phase. Where we are coming up with the idea of the event or bidding for the event. Then, once you actually get approval for the idea or bid, you go into the Planning Phase when you've develop your plans. Next or sometimes at the same time you start Implementing (Implementation Phase) the plans. Then there is the Event itself. Finally there is the shutdown or closure phase or the end of the event project. What is important about these phases is you do different things during different phases. Different knowledge is needed in each phase. In fact what you could do is turn up like this (draw phase lines on EMBOK cube).
For the Marketing Domain, for example, during the Initiation Phase you have different skills in marketing compared to the Planning Phase, when you put together a marketing campaign. When you start implementing (Implementation Phase) the marketing you're doing different tasks.
But this is not enough because these are just facts or nouns. What we need are the verbs. The verbs are the Processes. so that is your third dimension. The processes are various and they are in all these different areas and there are different processes at different times. But there are some processes which you might call Universal Processes. Risk management is one of them because you're going to use risk management everywhere. A process, like Site Design, which will in the part of the Design Domain and it will interact with the Operations Domain.
What you can do to describe the profession even more accurately is look at any one of these nodes. Let's do it as a cell, just a tiny little square like that. Each one of these nodes comes from anywhere in this block of the profession and can be described by:
• Competency: how confident are you to do it.
• Schedule: when things actually have to be done. Time is a tremendously important process. Scheduling is a very important process.
• Checklists
• Standards (or Codes): there are Standards for various things: Standards in marketing, standards in risk management, standards in operations such as human resource standards.
This cube was indeed the start of the EMBoK. We put it all together. My concepts were the Phases, Risk and the Process. The Processes is what I regarded is the most important. Process mapping is a tremendously important part of any profession because they are the verbs. A process is a series of tasks that is invariant. The series doesn't change but what the task acts on does change. The process itself doesn't change. You are calling certain processes in operations at different times. Risk management is a good example the universal process that must use throughout the whole project for the putting an event together.
It has now become an international standard called the Event Management International Competency Standard (EMICS) you should have a look. Look it up on the web okay nice to do this presentation for you and good luck with all your events.