When I was in high school I was constantly sick with a cold. My best friend was convinced I had some sort of cancer (she is a little bit of a hypochondriac :))

The colds were never bad enough that it significantly impacted my life but I was always low-energy and foggy. I thought that this was just the way my body functioned and accepted it for a long time.

It wasn’t until I intentionally started working towards a healthier lifestyle years later that I understood what the real problem was. I realized I wasn’t taking care of the deeper issues that were the actual causes of my colds in the first place. I didn’t exercise; I didn’t know healthy boundaries with my energy so I said ‘yes’ to working too many shifts at the party store (my first job!); I didn’t know how to handle my emotions; I had terrible sleeping habits, etc.

Rather than just resting and taking medicine to address my symptoms, I looked at how I could improve my health for the long-term by creating better habits and tuning into my body more.

When I work with businesses I look at it from a similar perspective. Whenever an issue (a symptom) comes about, I stop and ask “are we addressing the illness or just the symptoms?”

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A few weeks ago, I wrote the first part of my experience in managing a 400 person conference and what it taught me about project management and operations. The first part talked about having the right people on your team (love my OC’s!). This next part will talk about the principles that helped me keep order with almost 400 students from 20+ countries and 40+ staff members.

The principles are: simplify, standardize and centralize.

You will have many moving parts and pieces of information while you are working on any project. In order to keep details from falling through the cracks, look for how you can implement these principles.

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In a past life, I produced and managed large conferences. When I first started this line of work, I had no idea it would teach me everything I needed to know about launching and running successful projects. The one conference in particular that taught me the most was a week-long conference for 350+ high school students from mostly Muslim countries that were part of a Department of State sanctioned exchange program (not your typical conference in any way, shape or form).

When I managed the first conference for these students, it was- for a lack of a better word- a shit show. The second conference was also a shit show. There were sleepless nights organizing flight information for students flying to Lebanon, missing documents required to take students to the hospital and so on and so forth. When the third conference rolled around, lots had to change. I took what I learned from the first two conferences and revamped the whole planning and onsite execution process. The next time you are launching any sort of project, there are a lot of key things to keep in mind, but this one will be vital.

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