What’s the worst event you have attended?
22 June 2007 | Steve Bagshaw
Searching for procurement news takes the team at SM all over the world to hear speakers and presenters talk about the profession.
So it can be disappointing when you attend conferences to hear the same presentation rehashed for the third time, or speakers just attend to promote their products and services.
But if we, as non-buyers, cannot get any information worth imparting to you from these events, it must be doubly frustrating for purchasers paying a lot of money and hoping to get some nuggets of information from these events.
What are the worst events you have attended, and how could they be improved for buyers?
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I’d be keen to hear on recommendations of good events especially. Programmes from IQPC, Marcus Evans and those general events companies all read well, but the £1200 price point is a big plunge into my training budget.
Avoid any event that costs a fortune yet claims to help produce effective business skills – they are a blatant contradiction in terms.
I like many of the events this publication helps advertise. For every excellent CIPS Seminar and local gathering, there is a three-four day sustainability event in Australia, or mansion house weekend of champagne and cavier to discuss efficiency savings in training. The twisted genius of some event organisers gets too little attention as far as I’m concerned.
I find a certain procurement event (held around May and in central London, set over two days) is usually pretty worthless. The presentations are quite good, but the management of the event has stunk both of the times I have attended and it ends up being an exhausting day of queue hopping to get into two or three twenty minute sessions of what we can also glean from the presentations when they go up on a website a few days later. The event crams the suppliers in so that networking is almost impossible, with rival suppliers cutting in and hordes trying for free gifts and competitions rather than anything relating to work. The whole thing has lost its way completely since combining with a similar event – leading to half the thing being of little to no consequence to half the attendees.