Centralising meetings and events

Every failed centralisation of meetings and events we have come across failed the same way. Somebody announced a new process, the process was slower than what people were already doing, and within a quarter the organisation had quietly returned to what it did before — except now with a policy document nobody follows and a programme owner who has lost credibility.

The central argument of this guide is simple and it is not primarily about procurement. Centralisation fails when it is imposed as a control and succeeds when it is offered as a service that is faster than the alternative. Everything that follows — what to centralise, in what order, how to communicate it, how to handle the department that refuses — is a consequence of that one principle.

This is the change-management companion to how to build an SMM programme, which covers what you actually construct. Here the subject is people, and specifically why capable people rationally avoid processes designed for the organisation rather than for them.

Start by accepting that they are usually right. Not right in terms of the organisation’s interests, but right in terms of the decision they were actually making, with the information and the deadline they actually had.

The person booking outside the process is typically not being difficult. They have a meeting to arrange, a room to find, a date that cannot move and a job that is not events. They know a venue that worked last time. Ringing that venue takes four minutes. The alternative, as far as they can tell, involves a form, a wait and somebody asking them questions they have not thought about yet.

If you do not understand that calculation properly, you will design a process that loses to it.

Only the sixth of those is addressed by enforcement. The rest are addressed by making the route faster, better known and demonstrably better on quality — which is why enforcement-first centralisation has such a poor record.

A great deal of confusion in this area comes from one word covering two separate propositions. Centralised visibility means the organisation can see all of its meetings activity. Centralised execution means one team does the buying.

They are frequently discussed as if they were the same decision. They are not, and in most organisations the first is worth considerably more than the second, costs far less to achieve and provokes a fraction of the resistance.

Do not start with everything. A programme that attempts organisation-wide coverage on day one arrives at every department simultaneously, which means every objection surfaces at once with no counter-example available to answer it.

Choose a first slice for what it will teach you and what it will prove, not for how easy it will be.

This is the principle the rest of the guide rests on. A central meetings function is either something people use because it helps them, or something they route around. There is no durable third state, because compulsion in this category is genuinely hard to enforce — the spend is small, urgent, dispersed and easy to disguise.

What the principle means in practice is specific and uncomfortable, because it commits the central team to things it can fail at publicly.

The framing of the announcement does more to determine the outcome than the design of the process. It is the moment at which every department decides, largely permanently, whether this is something being done for them or to them.

Lead with the offer. Name the benefit to the person receiving the message, not the benefit to the organisation. Visibility, spend control and supplier consolidation are the organisation’s benefits and they are real — but they are not reasons for a department head to change what they do on a Tuesday afternoon.

The most effective communication is not an announcement at all. It is a pilot department telling colleagues what it was like — which is why the pilot group should be chosen partly for whether anyone will believe them. The broader sequencing of this is covered on implementing Strategic Meetings Management.

There is usually one. Sometimes it is the largest department, which is worse. Before treating it as a governance problem, work out which of three things you are actually dealing with, because they need entirely different responses.

A tactical note that costs little and works more often than it should: ask the resisting department to help design the next version. People who have shaped something defend it, and the objections of a department that runs real volume are usually the most accurate feedback available about where the process is genuinely weak.

Where the answer is genuine intransigence, the escalation belongs to the sponsor, not to you. A programme owner who spends political capital compelling one department has less of it for the nine that were willing. Meetings governance covers where those decisions should sit.

Adoption is the number that tells you whether centralisation is working, and it is the one most often measured in a way that flatters the programme.

The dishonest version measures activity that came through the route as a proportion of activity you know about — which is circular, because the route is how you know about it. It produces a number close to complete and means nothing.

The honest version compares what came through the route against total identifiable activity from independent sources: accounts payable, card data, travel bookings, departmental records. That number will be uncomfortable in the first year. It is also the only one that tells you anything.

Adoption almost always plateaus somewhere, usually between three and nine months in, and usually after the initial group of willing users have been absorbed. The instinct at that point is to escalate — a reminder from a senior sponsor, a tightening of the policy, a chase list. That instinct is nearly always wrong, and it is wrong because it treats a service problem as a compliance problem.

Diagnose before you escalate. There are four common causes and only one of them responds to authority.

One further possibility worth holding in mind: the stall may be telling you the programme is at the right size. If the activity outside the route is genuinely small, genuinely local and genuinely low-risk, the honest conclusion may be that the remaining coverage is not worth pursuing. Decentralised meetings management covers the case where full centralisation was never the right target, and reducing fragmented event spend covers what to do about the fragmentation that remains.

It is worth restating, because centralisation becomes an end in itself remarkably quickly and programmes start measuring coverage rather than outcomes.

The point is not that one team does the booking. The point is that the organisation can see what it is committing to, buy it competently, contract for it consistently and account for where its people are — while the people who need meetings to happen find the whole thing easier than what they were doing before.

Event management asks how a particular event is delivered successfully. Strategic Meetings Management asks how the organisation should manage all of its meetings. That distinction is drawn out properly on SMM versus event management. Centralisation is one of the mechanisms available to answer the second question, and it is the one most likely to be mistaken for the answer itself.

Where you end up on that spectrum is a matter of proportion rather than principle. The maturity model describes the levels organisations typically settle at, and is SMM right for your business includes the cases where centralising further would cost more attention than it returns.