Much like any PM challenge, this 3-day festival of peace, love and music had a variety of teams that needed to communicate and collaborate to best plan for the 32 musical acts and nearly half a million attendees. Well, we all know that hind-sight is 20/20. When you examine the Woodstock festival, it’s clear where the PM team excelled and where they failed and provided the future of concert promoters with a “lessons learned” plan.

Project Agreement

According to Wikipedia’s Woodstock entry, the original project agreement was that it would be a profit-making venture with a limited ticket sales available at a handful of NYC record stores and via snail mail. It was communicated to the town that about 50,000 festival-goers would turn up, despite the fact that an estimated 186,000 tickets were already sold before-hand and another 15,000 attendees would probably show up and pay at the gate. You can see the trouble brewing already.

Townspeople and board members alike tried to prevent the concert from happening and went as far as to force the building inspector to post “stop work” orders. The Woodstock folks tore them down and Project Agreement Revision 1 was born. Because the crowd was already arriving (days earlier than the show was to begin) and in greater numbers than expected, Woodstock Ventures was forced to take a financial hit and use all of their resources to get the stage built. Workers around-the-clock pitched in and so began the ball towards many more project agreement revisions.

Risk Management

Many issues could have been anticipated but were not. Thousands of ticket-holders found themselves without proper sanitation, first aid and even food. Sullivan County declared a state of emergency. At this time, Woodstock Ventures went into risk management mode:

Project Agreements – During any crisis, a project agreement needs to bring everyone together and relaunch the project from the same starting line. The more people that understand the plan and act on it, the more life there is in the project’s process. If only one person knows the plan, it is useless. Imagine if the people running the Woodstock festival did not have a road map to keep everyone together.

Team Dynamics – Team dynamics are a challenge on an average day so you can imagine how crisis mode can exasperate the situation. In the case of Woodstock, employees and attendees worked together to make the weekend work out for everyone’s safety and enjoyment. Talking openly about the situation allows people to feel control over what’s taking place. Had the Woodstock folk lied about the dire situation they were in, it could have gotten ugly. In fact, many people still look at this event and are in awe that fights did not break out and chaos did not ensue. Despite the lack of food and sanitation, everyone worked together, not against each other.