functions department shadowing

This morning I went to the Functions Department to learn what Yvette, the Functions Manager, does on a daily basis. At first I wasn't sure how interesting the 1.5 hours would be, seeing different office work that she does, but Yvette has a lot of interesting work that she does! In Functions you can never be systematic, you always have to be ready for walk-ins and phone calls because those make up most of the revenue. Daily tasks include always checking email and voicemail and responding with wedding or conference packages to give the customer what they could choose from. Those should be sent out 24 hours or less after receiving the first enquiry. The next step is often negotiations (which Yvette said the Americans do the most! not surprising. Although she did say Americans were the best at negotiating as well.) Yvette explained two different event planning programs - Opera and Visio. Opera is where all event details are kept. Visio is a really cool program - it has all of the rooms in the school to scale, and all tables, chairs, dance floors, to scale as well. This is how they do the floor plans, by moving around the pictures of tables and chairs and seeing how it fits before organizing the room before the event. Another important aspect is keeping a functions folder for every event including every correspondence that you have with the client (basically to save yourself from any arguments with the client, because you will have exactly what they agreed to in the folder.) She showed us a recent client who had many "complaints" and yet she has come back to ICMS for events again and again. The morning was much more interesting than I expected, and Yvette told us we can come back to ask questions or shadow again.

Tonight I'm going out to an Italian restaurant in Manly with Mike. Tomorrow I'm going into Sydney to walk around the Botanical Gardens and stop by Chinatown. Saturday I'm going out in Sydney to the Sydney Waratahs Rugby Game (have to brush up on my rugby beforehand.) A lot to look forward to!

Cheers!