BS 8901: One Year Later

Last summer at this time we were finalizing our reporting for BS8901 Certification. At that time, this was posted on our internal Wiki:

"BS 8901 provides guidance in the form of easy to understand practical information designed to assist the user to implement the requirements and those in event management to manage their environmental, financial and social risks and impacts spanning all aspects of event management."

It is one year later and as I have blogged, our commitment to BS8901 has had a phenomenal positive impact on our organization. But it hasn’t always been easy. In the spirit of transparency, here’s what I found on our internal Wiki just today:

“BS 8901 is a complicated, difficult to understand approach to managing events sustainably. Or at least that is what we all thought when we first got into considering if we wanted MeetGreen to become a BS 8901-certified company. Frankly, we still feel BS 8901 is challenging to understand and probably can think of other things that are a lot more interesting to do, such as reviewing 200 page Banquet Event Orders.

But! We have also come to realize there are business benefits to standardizing and systemizing what we do at MeetGreen. Standards of practice can help us do what we do in a more consistent way for clients. Standards also help us duplicate our approach to event management in our emerging virtual environment that has staff working remotely in different corners of the world. In addition standards help us show the return on investment we give our clients by requiring measurement and promoting service improvement. And in a pinch, it helps to know that if one of us won lotto and
took a permanent vacation to a small island in the South Pacific tomorrow that a team member could easily step into our place in a seamless way for our clients.

So this is what BS 8901 is all about: standardizing our event management practices. Making what we do systematic. "

Now about that lotto ticket...