Christmas Market

As a part of the event management course at Oxford Brookes University, third-year students have been organising the Oxford Brookes Christmas Market.

I was a part of the logistics team. I felt that we had excellent communication internally in the group. Most of the time when we needed to do something, we would discuss between us who should do what. I felt that maybe if we had a designated person(s) to be the team manager from the start, it would allow us to share the responsibilities to better success. After a few weeks, we kind of informally established two leading people in the team. I believe this was good as now every time we had a task, we did not have to discuss who would do it, and the tasks were alighted out by the “team managers”. Even though, while reflecting on the first few weeks, I could have taken on more responsibility as I felt that some of the other team members had more tasks than I did.

Communication between the groups was not ideal the first few weeks. I remember that groups would argue between each other saying things such as “we need this from vendors” “we can’t do this before we get the information from entertainment” etc. and basically blaming other people for why things were not happening. I was also one of these people. I now realise that blaming other people for delays was extremely unproductive, and it did not create any solutions. I remember thinking that the reason why the communication was so poor was that we did not have one event manager that was responsible for seeing the notification being sent to the different groups. What happened was people would send or ask for information about a matter to one person, and then that person would not tell the rest of the team. This created a rather inadequate flow of information between the different groups. However, a few weeks before the actual event, we all sat down and discussed the lack of communication. To fix this problem, each of the teams assigned one contact person that the other teams could contact, and that person was responsible for sharing the information within the different groups. After this, the communication across teams was great.

On the day of the actual event, I was the site manager of the Piazza. Not much was going on out there other than the two food vans. I enjoyed talking to the two vendors we had outside. Every time someone bought anything, I would remind them that more things were happening down in the forum. Still, I feel like we could have done more outside to promote the market. One of the vendors mentioned to me that no sign or anything was suggesting the Christmas market was happening inside. He also said that maybe this resulted in people not walking through the forum would miss out. I agreed and wrote it down to discuss that further in the post-event discussion group.

In conclusion, I really enjoyed the Christmas Market and believed that everyone from the vendors to the students also enjoyed the event. I have put the link to a short video a friend of mine made just showing some of the things that the vendors were selling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIYFknMUuf4

Best,
Rasmus