heidiwong323-blog

[heidiwong323-blog]

Personal reflection on the workshop 

  My essay topic in last assignment of event Management was ‘Are Olympics Venues and the infrastructure wise investment’. At the very first beginning, I did not choose Olympics as my essay topic. I was about to write the contemporary issues in ‘Peak to Fong’ such as dog fighting, crowd control or dogs mess up the public area. This event was held annually and it was a charity walk from the Peak in Hong Kong to Lan Kwai Fong, Central for dog owners who can bring along their dogs. The aim for this event was about fund raising for the Hong Kong Dogs Rescue to support its administration fee and medical cost for the stray dogs in Hong Kong. As a 200% dog lover like me, this topic was definitely making me feel interested to write. However, I could not find much information about the contemporary issues in this event from the academic journals nor the newspapers for supporting my essay after two weeks of research. Therefore, I switched to another topic ‘The risk management of the countdown in Lan Kwai Fong’. My initial thinking was how to implement the crowd control during the countdown. On January 1, 1993, a tragedy was happened there and caused 20 people were killed due to the stampede. However, not much information I could find about this once again, only the information from the newspaper was not enough to support my essay. Besides, one of my classmates also wrote about the crowd management in the religious event. In order not to duplicate and avoid the conflict, I switched to a new topic again. Finally, I found my essay topic ‘Olympics’ which made me feel interested when I had a discussion with my colleagues.

  I started to have research in the website ‘Google Scholar’ by typing ‘Olympics’. Thousands of articles showed up and be honest it was totally a disaster to read each by each within a tough schedule. So I narrowed down the searching area by typing some keywords such as ‘cost, Olympics, white elephant stadium’. Then the searching area was much more centralized and concentrated. However, another issue raised up again, we did not have much authority to get access to the academic journal unless you have membership of the designated website. Most of the academic journals need us to pay in order to read. Therefore I needed to search my interested journal in ‘Google’ and hopefully there were some PDF file were uploaded there and free of charge to read. Luckily I found some free journals for my research. As I mentioned, I kept changing my topics for a few times and actually I had already wasted few weeks to do the research. I was almost hitting the deadline but I could not even write a few words about my essay. I was completely stressed out at the time due to my anxiety. Fortunately, my course lecturer gave me a lot of valuable opinions and guidelines to help me for brainstorming to write this essay. Otherwise it was a tough task for me to complete the last assignment. 

  As a part time student, it is hard for us to go to work in the morning and go to class for hours after work twice a week. We need to accomplish two assignments per module plus examinations within limited of time due to the condensed course. Besides, English is not our first language, we were having lots of difficulties to read the academic journal. However, I admit that the academic journals are really good piece of work to give us an in-depth thinking of each issue. I had really learnt a lot from it for how to write a good essay. Although the process of last assignment was really exhausted, I felt satisfactory from this experience after finished it.

    How to implement the risk management in the Hong Kong Pet Show?

  After hearing from Asker, his presentation about the theft in Hong Kong Jewellery Show inspired me to write about the risk management in Hong Kong Pet Show as well. Should we apply risk management and how to implement in Hong Kong Pet Show?

  Hong Kong Pet Show is held every year in Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. It usually takes 3-4 days every year. This Pet show welcomes the pet owners to bring along their pets, the pets attend this show are mainly dogs. This show is the best venue for the pet lovers to join together to have news update, social around and share the experience. In last show in February 2017, the attendees were nearly 440k, around 400 booths in Hall 3 (approximate 140k square fee). The pet show provides variety of different brands of pet food and pet appliances to choose, a competition of Dog Olympic and the pet adoption corner. As this event is getting bigger per year, it raises the safety issues when participating into this event. From Facebook, we can often see the comments about this event such as dog fighting and caused injuries. According to Reid and Ritchie, large event can draw big portion of people to gather in a defined venue and potential impact may be arisen. Therefore, the event organizers need to be cautious and responsible to ensure the safety of all the attendees and be capable to deal with the risk during the event. Risk management planning is definitely can help the event organizers to conduct the events in the most safety way and minimize the risk. Silvers also mentioned that ‘risk management is the purposeful recognition of and reaction to uncertainties with the explicit objective to minimize liabilities and maximize opportunities.’

  The risk management process can be divided into 5 core steps. First step is the identification of risk, second is analysis of risk, third is evaluation and ranking the risk, fourth is your respond to the risk, the last but not the least is keep tracking and review of the risk.

  First step, the event organizer must identify the potential risk maybe occur during the event and list down.

  1.         Animals are out of control

2.         Dogs are easily to get loose

3.         Animals easily to get sick as too centralized in one concentrated area

4.         Human easily to get hurt because of animals’ bite

5.         Animals mess up the area as pee and poo around

6.         Crowd control

7.         Dogs fighting

8.         Accessibility and convenience for animals to the venue

  Second step, we start to analyse the consequence of the above identified risk which may affect the objectives of hosting this event.

  Third step, we need to evaluate and set priority of the risks which may possible occur.

  Fourth step, we need to know how to respond to the risks, it means we need to minimize the risks to the lowest level. Take for example, we can ask the pet owner to show a vaccination card of his pet which is valid within 3 months to prove the pet do not carry any spreading disease. Ask the owner to wear a mask for its dogs to avoid biting humans or other dogs. Request the dog owner to have a leash on his dog in order to avoid get lost and easier to control when accident happen. The owner has to responsible to clean up the dogs when it fouls.

  Last but not the least is to review the risk and keep monitoring according to the list. This list helps to remind you how to minimize unexpected risk and immediate correspondence can be taken. It also can helps you to have a better planning for next dogs show. The end result for that can be a happy, successful and smooth event if the organizer can follow the above steps.

    Cheung Chau local residents should have privilege to the ferry during the Bun festival

  After reading a journal about the motivations that make a visitor to go to the tourist destination, it inspires me to write about the impact to the local residents due to Bun Festival, also known as Tai Ping Ching Chiu Festival in Cheung Chau. 

  Cheung Chau is one of the outlying island at the southwest side of Hong Kong. This island is around 2.45 square kilometers and it has the highest number of population among other islands such as Lantau Island. According to last year data from the newspaper, the population of Cheung Chau is around 23, 000. The only transportation between Cheung Chau and the city is travelling by ferry from Central Pier. People choose here as living place because they obsess with the peaceful environment where can give them a relief from the rigid and routine schedule in city. However, Cheung Chau is a very busy island as many Hong Kong people come to visit during weekends and holidays. Recently, it is also crowded even on normal weekdays as foreigners would come forward to visit too. According to the board of Hong King Tourism, it is ranked as the most popular outlying island to be visited.

  So what makes Cheung Chau to be the most busy and most attractive island? It is a well-developed island with hotels, seafood restaurant and some signature local shop which sells the dried seafood. Besides, the Bun festival is a traditional festival which is held in May annually.  It usually takes 4 days and it attracts lots of visitor come forward. The Bun festival has parade of floats, lion and dragon dances, ceremony to pray to Chinese god, the Tin Hau for the safety for fisherman to get rid of pirates. Children would dress up in legendary and famous Chinese character to perform. This event definitely helps to boost Cheung Chau as a tourism destination, the shops manager report that these tourists boost the income at 40 percentile during the weekend according to South China Morning Post.

    Apparently, this event is an advantage for Cheung Chau local business but it is not the same thinking for the local residents. Anger from the residents is spreading over the social media. As we mentioned, ferry is the only transportation to connect the island and the city. The ferries are always packed with the visitors and it causes inconvenience for the local residents to queue for hours to be on board. One of the page ‘Give me back Cheung Chau’ from Facebook commented that ‘Guess I can only back home on May 30 due to the crowd’. Some local residents even have to escape to Lantau Island due to this event.

Although the First ferry already provides 16 extra lines to take the people back and forth during this peak season, it still cannot solve the high demand of capacity. A queue of 100 meters long is still lining up outside the pier including the local residents who want to go home. Therefore, I suggest that the ferry line should give privilege to the local residents by setting a priority queue or provide priority seats. The local residents can show a pass to prove they are living in Cheung Chau and then go straight to the priority queue so they can go home or go to work efficiently. In my opinion, this arrangement will be fair and ease the anger for the local residents who live there.

    Hong Kong is well prepared to against the terrorism

  After hearing Pamela’s presentation of the human injuries happened during Marathon, the terrorist attack in Boston Marathon happened on April 15, 2013 crossed my mind and inspired me to write the caption topic.

  In recent decades, the mega events are always the target for terrorists to attack. Take for example, from Munich massacre in 1972, 11 members of Israeli Olympic team were hostage and 1 police officer both got killed by the terrorist of Palestinian during the Summer Olympics. Boston Marathon in 2013, 2 bombs were detonated by Islamic terrorists near the finish line during the Marathon; it caused 6 people were dead and 280 people were in injuries. Celebration of Bastille Day in Nice in 2016, the Islamic terrorists drove a 19 tons of cargo truck to the crowd, this attack caused 86 people got killed and 434 in injuries. The cases I just mentioned were just a few from the whole list of terrorist attack. It is a truth that the Islamic terrorist is spreading its attack all over the world, indeed it is going ‘globally’. They are not only aim at the Europe countries, they are also looking for new target in Asia and actually they did it in Xinjiang in 2016.

  Hong Kong is the host of Hong Kong Sevens, the rugby game. It is held in April every year and attracts many spectators all over the world. This event raise my concern that if Hong Kong also be one of the terrorist target because of the ‘global trend’. Is there any preparation for us to prevent this happen? Hong Kong is always claimed as a safety city to live. Our government has been doing a lot to keep us safe from time to time. According to the website from our government, the achievements by our government are shown as below:

  Upgrading the capacity in police force

  Arrange special trainings for the police and extra polices to patrol in landmark and sensitive areas

Keeping review and conduct the responsive plans to terrorist due to changing environment

Keeping good communication with overseas and China law enforcement agencies

  Improving security in air travel

  Intensive x ray screening for the luggage and passengers

Arrange more police to patrol in the airport

Belonging items from passengers are checked strictly

  Improving border controls

  Provide extra marine to patrol

Use advance technology to screen fake passport

  Upgrading emergency services

  Importing new equipment and introducing intensive specialist training to get well prepared of the attack from chemical, radiological or nuclear

Ensure our hospitals have enough stock of medicine

  For some of my own opinions, I also suggest that our government can also encourage the citizens to be cautious and keep alert all the time by providing some seminars for anti-terrorism. The Hospital Authority should also provide free training of first aid service for citizens so we can help injuries people immediately when accident happen. If our government can keep the stability of the above or even keep improving then HK is definitely well-equipped for anti-terrorism.

Implication for my future career  

Event management is applicable for project management to create and develop for festivals and events. Event management involves the planning, identify the target audience, sales and marketing, logistics and risk management before officially launch the event. The planning stage involves the calculation of budget, selection of venue, coordination of transport, decorations in venue and security. Sales and marketing is the key stage to promote the products or services to the potential customers during the event. Implement the risk management can help the organizer to run the event smoothly. Imagine when the organizer already have a list of correspondence when he has already reviewed all the potential risk may occur, the event must be definitely successful.

  Whether you are going to step into event management or other occupation, we always have to remember the core principles of a good employee are totally no change regardless of which job industry. The principles are being flexible, organized, passionate, good time management, good communication skills.  Being flexible can help you to have immediate response when there are changes during the event, good communication skills can help you to understand what your client look for so easier and directly to achieve the target; being organized can help the things smooth because an event manager have to take care different tasks and teams; good time management is an ability to handle multi task but accomplish on time; having passion in your job can bring creativity and excitement.