Most event performance issues aren't caused by bad planning or the wrong tools.
They’re caused by the systems around the events themselves.
More often than not, organizations try to fix these foundational system problems by upgrading technology, sending teams to training, or restructuring roles. But those surface-level solutions fail to address the real problems: unclear decision rights, cross-functional misalignment, workflow gaps, and governance breakdowns that repeat every event cycle.
The Event System Diagnostic is a structured 30-day engagement designed to bring systemic friction to the surface, clarify what's actually driving the dysfunction, and deliver a sequenced 30/60/90 roadmap the organization can act on — powered by ACCORD®.
Diagnostic Overview
What It Is
The Event System Diagnostic is a 30-day engagement that goes inside your event organization and maps how the system actually functions across teams, workflows, and decision-makers.
The goal is simple:
Discover what's not working, why, and what to do about it.
Cross-functional relationship dynamics
Decision rights and governance
Workflow breakdowns
Operational friction
Role clarity and ownership
System dependencies
Deliverables
What you Get
At the conclusion of the engagement, your organization receives three core deliverables.
1
Event System Map
A visual representation of how the event function operates within the broader organization.
This map highlights:
Core cross-functional relationships
System dependencies
Structural strengths
Areas of operational strain
The goal is not to document the entire organization, but to reveal the structural dynamics shaping event performance.
2
Top Structural Friction Themes
A synthesized set of 3–5 recurring structural findings.
These themes identify the most significant sources of friction within the event system, such as:
Role ambiguity
Governance gaps
Cross-team coordination breakdowns
Operational bottlenecks
Each theme is framed at the root-cause level, not as isolated symptoms.
3
30 / 60 / 90 Day Roadmap
A prioritized sequence of 3-5 high-leverage actions.
The roadmap focuses on:
Stabilizing the event system
Introducing structural clarity
Strengthening governance and workflows
The output is initiative-level guidance, not implementation plans.
Process
How It Works
The full engagement takes approximately 30 days, depending on stakeholder availability. Your organization's time commitment is 12-15 hours.
The process gathers signal from three sources: your people, your documentation, and the patterns between them.
1. Stakeholder Interviews
5–8 semi-structured interviews that explore how work actually moves across the organization
2. Artifact Review
A structured review of core operational materials to assess what exists, what's actually used, and what's missing.
3. Pattern Synthesis
Interviews and artifacts are cross-referenced to identify recurring friction and structural patterns.
If Not Now, When?
The next 30 days can look like every other month — or this could be the month everything changed.
Testimonials
"Jen brings a level of calm, strategic clarity that changes the energy of an entire delivery team. When we faced real uncertainty this past year, she stepped in and led with the kind of quiet confidence that meant the team stayed focused — not because the situation was easy, but because Jen made it feel manageable. The event went perfectly. I trust her implicitly."
Melissa Harrison, Vice President, Consumer Technology Association
"Over four event seasons, Jen became an indispensable part of how we operated — evaluating, selecting, and implementing a growing suite of tools, shepherding vendor integrations, and making sure everything held together end-to-end. She knows the event tech space better than anyone I've worked with, and she has an innate sense of how to pair technology with the specific culture and needs of an event program. She was a force multiplier for our success."
Emily Kayser
"I've had the pleasure of working with Jen for over a decade — starting at Microsoft, where Eventbase partnered with her for eight years, and continuing through Oracle, CES, and Databricks. She's reliable, thoughtful, and genuinely forward-thinking."
Jeff Sinclair, CEO & Co-Founder, Eventbase
Why do you interview five to eight people?
Because even within the event function, the work rarely lives with one person.
There's usually someone managing logistics, someone owning technology, someone handling content or communications — and they each experience the system differently. Five to eight interviews ensure that picture is complete, not just representative of whoever responds first.
Where cross-functional relationships are clearly part of the strain — intake from marketing, resourcing conversations with ops — those stakeholders may be included. But the scope is determined by what the org actually looks like, not by a fixed list. Most engagements stay close to the event function.
The goal is coverage, not volume. Fewer interviews risk missing the pattern. More risk chasing noise.What do you do with our documents and templates?
Two things: assess what exists, and assess whether it's working.
The artifact review looks at breadth first — are the basics covered? Intake forms, planning templates, role definitions, postmortems. Not every organization has all of these, and that itself is useful information. Then depth — where something does exist, is it complete enough to actually guide the work, or is the team effectively reinventing it every cycle?
There's no grading system and no benchmark you're being held against. What's there is what's there. The artifacts don't tell me what's wrong — they tell me what the interviews confirm or complicate.
On confidentiality: everything shared during the engagement is covered by a mutual NDA signed before we begin. Documents are stored on encrypted, access-controlled servers — not shared drives, not commingled with other client work. Nothing is retained beyond the engagement or used for any other Two things: assess what exists, and assess whether it's working.Will you need access to our financials or budget?
No.
The diagnostic is scoped to how your event system functions — how work moves, how decisions get made, where ownership is clear and where it isn't. That picture doesn't require budget data, revenue attribution, or financial reporting of any kind.
If those conversations come up naturally in an interview — and occasionally they do — they stay in context. Nothing is extracted, analyzed, or included in the findings.What happens after the engagement ends?
You leave with three things: a clear picture of how your event system actually functions, the structural patterns that are creating the most strain, and a sequenced roadmap of where to focus first.
That roadmap is designed to be actionable on its own. The prioritization and sequencing are explicit — built to be acted on, not interpreted.
For organizations that want support getting there, a follow-on advisory engagement is available. The scope is built entirely around what the diagnostic surfaced — not a pre-packaged program, not a retainer template. If that's a conversation worth having, it starts with the roadmap.