Learning The Hard Way
I’ve been the GM at Great Escape for six years now. What started as a small event for a handful of people has grown into Tasmania’s premier NYE music festival. Over the years, I’ve learnt a lot of lessons, but perhaps none more important than the value of proper scheduling.
Go back five years and our team were complete novices. The event was pulled together by a small group of volunteers and eager friends. We had a rough idea of how to run a festival, but honestly, we made a lot of it up as we went.
The beauty of smaller events is that they’re forgiving. Mistakes rarely snowball into anything too serious. But even then, after just eight weeks of planning, the event went ahead surrounded by one of the toughest two-week periods we’ve ever experienced. We quickly discovered the intricacies and complexities of festival management.
Missed items, understaffing, poor timing, and general unpreparedness created an environment where people were working ungodly hours just to keep things moving. It was Great Escape’s, and my own, baptism by rain (if you know, you know).
When Scheduling Became Essential
Over the following years, the event grew, and so did the systems around it. Our core team of six became more experienced, and the first real signs of scheduling and logistical planning started to emerge. We began to understand that running a festival is really about orchestrating hundreds of moving parts at once. Guiding everything into place and somehow keeping it all “in tune”.
In year two, we experimented with simple daily task lists, but quickly realised they weren’t enough. They helped with visibility, but they couldn’t accurately track all the moving pieces, dependencies, timings, equipment movements, staffing requirements, and checklists that needed to happen throughout the day.
Over the last three years, we’ve fully embraced scheduling and have tried to improve year on year.
A huge part of that has been driven by our site manager Peter, who has become a massive proponent of scheduling and operational planning. One thing I’ve learnt is that scheduling needs ownership. It cannot just be something everyone vaguely contributes to. Someone needs to spearhead it, hold people accountable, and constantly refine the process. Without ownership, schedules quickly become outdated, ignored, or incomplete.
Scheduling Needs Ownership
What’s also become very clear is that scheduling is not just a site team responsibility. Every department needs to schedule their onsite tasks, and interdepartment collaboration is crucial. How can the creative team begin decorating a tent if the infrastructure team hasn’t erected it yet? How can the artist liaison team begin setting up backstage areas if the artist tents haven’t even arrived onsite?
Every department impacts another. A weak schedule in one area creates flow-on effects everywhere else.
Scheduling isn’t glamorous work. It’s time consuming, often repetitive, and can absolutely lead to disillusionment amongst staff if people don’t understand why they’re doing it. Buy-in from your team is incredibly important.
You need to sit down with your department heads and explain why scheduling matters. What does good scheduling actually look like? What problems does it prevent? What are the consequences when it’s ignored?
Because your overall event schedule is only ever as strong as the weakest department’s schedule.
One of the biggest lessons we’ve learnt is that scheduling cannot just happen day by day. It needs to happen hour by hour and sometimes minute by minute.
You need to know where your forklift is at any given point in the day. Who is putting up fencing and exactly when they start. When do artist tents arrive onsite? When is rigging complete? When are vehicles available? Which staff are free between 2pm and 4pm? These details sound excessive until you’re onsite and suddenly realise three departments are all waiting on the same piece of equipment or crew.
Why Weak Scheduling Creates Expensive Problems
Poor scheduling has cost us a lot over the years.
We’ve had containers arrive before the machinery needed to place them. We’ve returned expensive hire equipment late. We’ve underestimated workloads and had to bring in additional staff at the last minute. Last year alone, we attributed roughly $20,000 in onsite mistakes and inefficiencies to issues heavily influenced by poor scheduling.
For the last two years, the Great Escape team has been using EventLab for scheduling.
One thing I firmly believe is that you absolutely need dedicated scheduling software. Spreadsheets simply do not cut it anymore. They are fantastic planning tools, but no one walking around a muddy festival site is pulling out their phone to open a spreadsheet and check what happens next.
Why Spreadsheets Stop Working Onsite
Whatever system you use needs proper mobile compatibility and ideally needs to function offline. Festival sites are chaotic environments with poor reception, constantly changing priorities, and teams spread across large areas. Your scheduling tool should make the process smoother and less painful, but it should never replace critical thinking or effort from your team.
The software helps, but it still relies on good planning from your team.
Scheduling Is Also A Knowledge Bank
Another overlooked benefit of scheduling is that it transfers knowledge out of people’s heads and into something tangible.
A lot of festivals operate off knowledge that only lives in a few people’s heads. That might function in the short term, but once those people leave, a huge amount of operational knowledge disappears with them. Good scheduling creates a living knowledge bank for your event. It documents workflows, timings, dependencies, staffing requirements, and lessons learnt. Over time, that knowledge becomes incredibly valuable as teams evolve and new people step into roles.
Good scheduling turns experience into something future teams can actually learn from.
Better Scheduling Creates Better Working Environments
And perhaps most importantly, good scheduling creates a far better environment for staff onsite.
There’s nothing worse than crew members standing around not knowing what they should be doing. It creates confusion, frustration, and stress. In my experience, people get anxious when they feel like they aren’t contributing meaningfully.
A well-built schedule gives people purpose. Their days are filled with meaningful work, responsibilities are clear, and staff are able to operate far more autonomously. It allows management to step back and focus on bigger picture problem solving instead of spending the entire event manually assigning tasks every hour.
We’re still nowhere near perfect, and every year we continue learning from our mistakes. But we genuinely believe that improving scheduling accuracy and increasing staff engagement around scheduling has a huge return on investment.
Avoiding costly mistakes, reducing unnecessary labour costs, improving communication, preserving organisational knowledge, and creating smoother onsite operations easily justifies the time and energy spent planning before the event even begins.
Because ultimately, the less time your team spends putting out fires onsite, the more time they can spend actually building a great festival experience.
