Eight Preparations We Made in Order to Hold an External Event Aimed at IT Engineers

Introduction

Hello! I am a team member of the KINTO Technologies study session organizing staff.

The other day, we held a case study presentation and roundtable discussion session specializing in the field of corporate IT, under the title “KINTO Technologies MeetUp! Sharing Four Case Studies for Information Systems People by Information Systems People.”

Before the study session was held, a previous article on this topic talked about the steps from planning to launching by the organizing staff.

In this article, by way of a sequel to that one, I would like to tell you about the various things the organizing staff did in the run-up to holding it. Following the previous session, we hope this will
serve as a helpful reference for those looking to start and promote study sessions from scratch within their own organization.

The previous article mainly covered the following:

• Planning the study session
• Calling for organizing staff members and speakers
• Discussing the matters still pending
• Dividing up roles and starting up agile progress management

Now, I would like to delve deeper into things like what kinds of roles there were specifically, and what kinds of activities each of them entailed.

Preliminary Reporting to Management

This study session will be conducted as a "company activity" rather than "by individuals or volunteers". To get the appropriate support from the company, it is extremely important to report to management and get their understanding and advice regarding the activities.

Therefore, this time we have decided to report in advance to the management team in the following manner.

1. Reporting to the vice president (who is also the CIO and CISO): First of all, asking about the “holding of the event” itself, and asking for support
2. Reporting to the president: Asking about the objectives, KPIs, equipment to be used, and budget

Of course, when it comes to reporting, it is necessary to "set up a place for the report and make preparations in advance." However, by adopting the following format, we were able to carry it out relatively inexpensively.

1. Reporting to the vice president

   • Timing of implementation: Utilize the regularly scheduled departmental report meetings to provide updates.
   • Report materials: We used the original plan document virtually as is, and provided details about the budget at a later date.

2. Reporting to the president

   • Timing of implementation: Report during the regular recruitment team briefing session
   • Report materials: We summarized the plan document in three slides, and gave a simple report based on three points: an overview, the objectives, and the budget.

As a result, we received positive responses in both cases, such as "Let's give it a try."

Venue Arrangements

At KINTO's Muromachi office, there is a photogenic spot called "KINTO TOKYO Junction (commonly known as the Junction)" that is always used for company introductions and external announcements. There is no reason not to use this photogenic spot when holding your first study session.

Venue arrangements Junction bears the name of KINTO but is in fact owned by the parent company, Toyota Financial Services. For official use, permission from the parent company is required. However, a request can be made with just an email, and generally approval is given. We got the green light to use it for this event without any problems, too.

Building arrangements The venue is a building with a security gate, so we needed to set up a reception desk outside the security gate to welcome outside guests. We notified the building management in advance and asked if we could place a desk there. This was also approved without any problems. Also, when we got permission from the building, we discovered that the automatic doors leading to the entrance were locked outside of business hours (after 6pm) (they can be unlocked from the inside, but an ID card is needed to enter from the outside). We asked the building management how to deal with this, and they agreed to install a small sign. Consultation is vital, right?

Venue layout We were given permission to use the facilities, so all that was left was to decide how to lay out the venue! We had initially planned to use several large monitors for the presentation, but then we discovered a projector screen and decided we wanted to use a projector! However, we lacked the all-important projector for that, so we decided to procure one in a hurry, with a view to using it in future as well. (Everyone acted as one team wonderfully for this, too.) Wanting the layout to make the projector the main feature and encourage as many people as possible to take part as much as possible, this is what we came up with:

Arrangements for the desks and chairs We used the desks and chairs that were originally there at Junction, but they were not enough on their own... So, we gathered up desks and chairs that could be used within the company. We mainly borrowed desks and chairs from the break space and were able to secure the required number of desks and chairs.

On the day On the day, all the operation staff readily sprang into action, and we managed to get everything set up very quickly! The tidying up was also done really quickly, and this gave me a strong “one team” feeling, too. Everyone was amazing!

Finally Inviting guests from outside to Junction was also a first for a company event, too. Throughout it all, everyone pulled together as one team to make the company look as good as possible to as many people as possible. We plan to carry on holding more study sessions as an organization in the future, too. To that end, we intend to use the results of this one to make them even smoother to enjoy!

Snack Arrangements

We decided to hold a social gathering as part of the study session And when it comes to social gatherings, snacks are a must. Right, time to prepare those!

Snacks! The classic choice for a study session is pizza. It has been the most frequently provided food at the study sessions I've attended, leaving a strong impression on me We really wanted to make an impact right from the get-go, but since it was a first for everyone, we could not do anything over-the-top. So, we sensibly opted for pizza. Calories are right and just. And if there is pizza, there has to be cola. We were thinking that having these two would do the trick, but we were told from on high to provide some other drinks besides, so we prepared some alcoholic ones as well.

How much should we provide?　— Pizza — We had never paid any mind to how much there had been at the other study sessions we had taken part in up to then. How much would do...? The L-size pizza we were thinking of offering is 12 slices, and generally serves three to four people. This time, it's treated as a "light meal," so we decided to treat it as 5 people per slice. Even in the study sessions I've attended, people usually eat about 2 slices. We also took that personal experience into account. In the end, we arranged 10 pizzas for 50 people, thinking of a maximum of 40 participants plus the 10 operation staff.

How much should we provide?　— Drinks — For this, too, we also based the calculation on personal experience. Figuring that we usually drank around two or three cans per event ourselves...we decided to get three cans per person. The breakdown we decided on was to provide alcoholic drinks and soda in the ratio 1:1. Assuming 40 participants, that meant arranging 120 drinks.
However...plastic bottles would be handier for the soda. So, we switched to those, and also ended up ordering 48 (two boxes of 24), because it was a convenient quantity in terms of placing an order. We prepared a total of 60 alcoholic drinks. Together with the 48 bottles of soda, this gave a grand total of 108 drinks.

When should we arrange them by? We arranged the pizza the day before and the drinks three days before. We took delivery of all of them without any trouble.

What were the results like?

• Pizza: None left over
• Alcohol: Eight left over → 52 consumed
• Soda: 21 left over → 27 consumed

There were around 20 participants on the day, and the results were as above. This includes the food and drinks consumed by the staff on the day as well.

In terms of the pizza, I feel there was not enough (because the operation staff did not get to have any of it). This is because the format of the social gathering was a "roundtable discussion" with KTC staff, and the time spent listening to each other was long, which meant more time spent eating. That is our analysis.

Also, in terms of the drinks, we think the alcohol was just right, but our impression is that there was too much soda. Some people said they wanted tea, so we felt it would have been better to provide that instead of soda.

In conclusion This was our first time providing snacks at a study session. So, while there were many things we were not sure about, I think we somehow managed to provide them without incurring any major dissatisfaction. We hope to provide them in a better way the next time we hold the session!

Producing a Novelty Item

HOS-PI-TAL-I-TY
KINTO Technologies is a new company that was established in April 2021. Also, the format for holding this event was offline, which means people needed to come all the way to the venue at our company. There would be snacks and drinks like the ones mentioned above as well, but to make the effort even more worthwhile, we wanted to prepare something for everyone to:

• take home with them and remember the company by.
• To that end, we decided to produce a novelty item.

How to make it happen?
The members of the organizing staff discussed the matter together, and the unanimous result was, “Let’s make a novelty item!” And so, a team was launched to produce one.

1. What to make? The first thing we did was to decide what kind of novelty item to make. Of course, there were budgetary constraints as well, and when batting ideas around, we also pictured the kinds of people we were anticipating would attend.

Part of the materials we used to bat ideas around

As a result, we decided to make a sticker this time!

Lessons learned: It's important to ground your endless thoughts in a practical place.

2. How to make it?
We had decided to make the item a sticker. We had a track record of making stickers for other in-house events, so we consulted with the design department, who have the know-how, about the purpose of the event, and with the corporate engineer about the expected attributes and interests of the visitors, and this is what we came up with!

Ta-da!

Based on these two patterns, we discussed which one would yield the most value as a novelty item for this event. As a result, we decided to go with the white-background, corporate-colors version!

How it turned out Then, we steadily proceeded with placing the order and settling the payment, and awaited the delivery...

Ta-da! (For the second time.)

Production was completed without a hitch in time for the event!

We hope that this novelty created with a one-team spirit spanning various departments will go on to be used in many places in the future as well, and help people know about KINTO Technologies.

Promotion and Measurement

Summary

• We thought about how to measure the results of this study session and how to announce the event itself.
• With the aim of gathering material for reporting to the company and indicators for doing kaizen (continuous improvement), we promoted the event as much as possible while measuring the influx into it and the impact of the event itself.
• We will share what we actually did, what we thought, and the results of our implementation.

Background The first thing we thought about was reporting the results to the company. We had said that the study session would raise awareness of KTC, so for reporting its results to the company, we needed to gather data to show how well it had done so (the number of participants being a prime example). And since we wanted to hold the study session itself a second and third time as well, we figured we would need to have indicators for doing kaizen. Above all, since this was the first study session we held for outside the company, we honestly had no idea how many people would attend. To do our utmost to avoid winding up with zero participants, we tried out as many announcement methods as we could.

In the end, we roughly settled on collecting the following indicators.

• Which channels had there been influx from, and how much?
• How much had the study session raised awareness of KTC?
  
  

What we did and thought In order to visually represent what indicators we wanted, first, we wrote down the structure of the influx.

Since we decided to accept entries to the event via connpass, we measured the influx into that. We also decided to measure how well the study session and roundtable discussion had helped raise awareness.

Since it was an info sys event, we decided to announce it on the info sys Slack. In addition, since KTC has a Tech Blog and X (formerly Twitter) account, we asked the team operating those to announce it as well. We also used the in-house Slack to call on all employees to spread the word about it via social media.

As results of the study session and roundtable discussion, we decided to prepare an X hashtag and pick up the number of posts and impressions that had it. Also, we decided to run a survey asking people if they had already known about KTC, measure the percentage who had not, multiply that by the total number of impressions, and use the result as a half-forceful way to measure the reach among people who had not known about the company before.

Finally, after the event, we decided to measure how the influx and following on our company’s X account, corporate website, and Tech Blog changed, and how they changed from before the event to after it.

Results Many people cooperated with spreading the word, and a total of 56 people applied to take part, so the capacity of 40 was filled up. On the day, 31 people actually came!

The influx per channel for connpass was as follows:

Up to the day of the event, there were 61 posts on X, and a total of 28,608 impressions. Of these, 376 were accessed, so 1.31% of the people who had viewed us on X had come to our connpass.

Our survey revealed that 39% of the event participants had not originally known about KTC. If we apply this to the 1,356 visitors to connpass, that means that 39% = about 530 people did not know about KTC before, so we succeeded in making that many people aware of KTC!! (A bit of a stretch)

Comparing before and after the event, the number of followers of our in-house X account increased slightly. The number of pageviews and unique users on our corporate website and tech blog were slightly higher than usual on the day of the event. However, we were able to see that it definitely had an effect, even if only a little, so we will continue to measure and improve from the second time onwards!

Announcement website preparation

Summary

• We opted for connpass as the medium for announcing the event, and prepared an information page about it.
• We learned about what kinds of events are popular from the top-ranking ones, and implemented our findings for our own event.
• connpass itself is a service that lets you to create events extremely easily, so creating the page was no struggle at all. This enabled us to put all the more thought into setting the target and deciding what message to convey.

Thoughts Seeing as it was going to be the first event we had ever held, we were terrified of getting zero participants... So, we resolved to create the best page that we could at the time.

What we did and thought First, we submitted an internal application to use an external service. If it is the first time a business is doing business with/using the service, it is necessary for the relevant department to check, but I cleared this without any problems.

Then, we decided on a management method for making the application. After briefly defining the purpose of management, the objects to be managed, and the purpose of use, we designated the system and account administrators, and then simply determined the specific account management method.

Once our application was approved and we could actually start working with connpass, first of all, we identified and checked out all the configurable items. This is because we wanted to leave it as a guide for holding future events, and also because we wanted to see if there were any irreversible settings. As a result of checking the items within the scope of an offline event with no participation fee, we found that the following two were the only ones that were unchangeable or restricted.

• Group: Unchangeable.
• Participation details and participation slots: Participation slots can be deleted only while there are no applicants.

Most of the items were changeable. However, if the date, time, or venue were to change, participants would be confused, so I think it's better to add, but not change or delete.

In addition to checking the specifications for the event information page, we also analyzed the popular events. We looked at the event rankings on connpass and picked out around 20 events that had the same attributes as our own and were extremely popular for some reason. We looked at them one by one, extracted and abstracted the elements that we felt were important, and applied them to our event information page.

Now that we knew the specifications and points to consider, we once again solidified the basic design. Before we could move on to the detailed design of the "Event Information Page," we first clarified the purpose of the study session and verbalized the following: 1) the target users, 2) the message, and 3) the basic rules for communication.

(1) The target users
We set the target to be corporate engineers who are actively into study sessions. We provisionally set the needs “Want to know about case studies from other companies” and “Want to connect with outside info sys people,” and created wording for the event information page in relation to those.

(2) Message
We opted for a message along the lines of “Let’s talk candidly about how other companies do info sys!” Wanting to spread study session culture is the theme of KINTO Technologies MeetUp!, and we want to convey our own ideas and so on, and hear other people’s as well. In order to achieve that, we wanted to provide the framework of a roundtable discussion, and create a forum where people would be able to talk to each other free from the distinction of internal versus external.

(3) Basic rules for communication
We made it a rule that the event should be a forum for input and output as means of studying. We firmly suppressed any thoughts like “Well, since we have gotten them to come, it would be a shame not to advertise KTC’s business, recruitment, and what makes it so great...,” and thoroughly stayed true to the concept of “a study session for info sys people by info sys people.”

When it came time to open the event to the public, from a technical standpoint, we decided to start with a low capacity and then increase it if necessary.

• It seems that there is a lot of last minute demand for tickets that are at the very limit.
• It's not embarrassing if there are few applications (important)
  
  

Results This is how it turned out:

The first KINTO Technologies MeetUp! event’s connpass page

Our takeaways from looking at popular pages were the following:

• People are more likely to attend if it is clear who the event is aimed at and what they will gain from participating.
• People are more likely to come an event if it seems safe.
  • Famous companies and people, etc.
  • Having images and videos that show the atmosphere of past events might also be good.
• Hot topics (for example, ChatGPT) seem to be a draw for people.

We also used notification emails to remind people just before the day. If there is a gap between the announcement and the event itself, we recommend giving people a well-timed reminder about it. This will also serve to keep the participants and operation people motivated.

Coordinating the Session

Overview

• Here's a comprehensive summary of the arrangements for the day.
• Specifically, these included creating a timetable for the event day, planning the roundtable discussion and deciding the venue layout, compiling the presentation materials, and managing the event’s progress.
• Although it was our first event, all of our staff proactively looked for work, and as a result, we were able to complete the event without any major issues and have a great time!

The key point It was our first-ever event

Actions/Things to consider

• Creating a timetable for the event day
• Planning the roundtable discussion and deciding the venue layout
• Compiling the presentation materials
• Managing the event’s progress

Execution result

• We were able to complete the event without any major issues.
• As it was our first event, and we had no idea what would happen, all the staff were on edge with adrenaline. I think the event was a success precisely because each and every staff member actively looked for jobs that were not even someone’s role and tasks that were not even tasks!

Preparation of the Case Study Presentation Materials by the Speakers

Case study presentations were going to be the main feature of this study session. Since the speakers-to-be had varying levels of experience of taking the stage at study sessions, after broadly deciding on the process for preparing the materials, we met up periodically to make sure no one is left behind as we proceeded with the work.

• Making the slide templates uniform
  • Based on the judgment that the presentation materials should look organized, we decided to use uniform templates. Slide templates for in-house use already existed, so we were able to agree on this matter smoothly.
• Setting deadlines that would serve as milestones
  • Setting a deadline that was right before the last minute would lead to uneven progress from person to person, so instead, we split up the process of creating the materials based on the following milestones, and used these to keep everyone on schedule.
    • Initial short-term deadline: We set a rough deadline of “in two weeks’ time,” and checked up on everyone then.
    • Show-each-other meeting: We held a meeting to check each other’s progress on creating the materials, stipulating that while no one would be told off for falling behind, they would certainly be urged to get a move on.
    • Review by the vice president: We set a deadline for the finished versions, with a view to getting the go-ahead from the vice president in advance.
    • Pre-rehearsal: We held a rehearsal among the presenters a week before the event, to get the presentations even more polished.

As a result, in the final pre-rehearsal, everyone had virtually finished their preparations in terms of getting their materials complete and staying withing the allotted time, and we could now look forward to the event day with peace of mind.

Lastly

Thanks to the organizing staff working so proactively, we were able to make it to the event day like this without a hitch.

I think this is a case study that truly embodies the philosophy of “One Team, One Player” that we champion as our working stance.

Thank you to everyone who took part, and to everyone who got involved on the operation side as well!

In addition to this Tech Blog article, at a later date, we are planning to release one that talks about the event from the operation staff’s perspective and one about the case study presentations by the speakers. Please do check those out as well!