Sr. Planner, Production Project Management

Senior Planner, Production Project Management

Gartner is searching for a Senior Planner to work within Gartner’s Production Experience and Marquee Content Center of Excellence. This role supports the global Destination Conference portfolio of events.

As the Senior Planner, you will provide administrative, logistical and organizational support in delivering the planning, pre-production, and on-the-ground execution of multiple conferences, events and projects.  A successful candidate will thrive in a quick moving environment with keen attention-to-detail. 

In this role, the Senior Planner will provide customer-centric project management and overall support at the highest level possible to the team. An understanding of live conference planning, conference project management is essential, and an understanding of the Audio-Visual function within conferences is a plus.

What you will do:

• Support project management for the creation and delivery of Gartner’s keynote sessions by partnering and collaborating with internal stakeholders in Conferences and Research & Advisory, as well as external vendors across multiple Conference portfolios.
• Support project management and liaise with External Speaker Team and AV partners as it relates to logistics and on-site management for Guest Keynotes.
• Support project management as it relates to scheduling outside speaker coaching and or graphic design team (external or internal) and ensure proper timelines are kept.
• All Gartner and Guest Keynotes are to be no longer than forty-five minutes in duration (in most cases). Collaborate/support with all parties to ensure script development and timing of delivery meet this criterion.
• Leverage best practices to support live conference/event production planning processes.

• Schedule and participate in pre-production and onsite global meetings, which may be out of typical business hours at times, often acting as the representative from the Production Experience team, taking notes and bringing those updates and any questions to the Project manager and or wider planning teams.
• Support in managing the production timelines, key milestones, show flow documents and logistics.
• Prepare routine correspondence and forms, such as internal and external briefing documents, logistics arrangements, on-site expectations, script management instructions and others as needed.
• Coordinate pre-event and on-site logistics including rehearsal scheduling, rehearsal logistics, AV setups, crew catering, and other on-site activities as required.
• Collaborate with internal/external partners and vendors on the production of visual assets.
• Support the team regarding all requirements for all onsite delivery assets including staging, scenic, graphics, audio, animation and all creative media components.
• Understand and uphold Gartner’s brand with all assets created.
• Meticulously track and prepare versions of scripts and graphics for delivery at Conferences around the world.
• Partner with and communicate with internal and external partners such as AV agencies, creative agencies, speaker/performance coaches, freelancers, and writers.
• Assist with budget reconciliation and tracking in coordination with management and finance including collecting and processing vendor invoices.
• Maintain detailed documentation and reports with attendee feedback, wrap-up notes and debrief reports from all parties who participated in keynote development.
• Proactively engage with the team to pursue process improvements.
• Highly skilled in handling multiple complex and concurrent projects.
• Support internal/corporate events periodically as the calendar permits.

What is expected:

• High Scores from clients on Keynote in each region.
• Flawless client experience – continual understanding of attendees’ key priorities and map back to those metrics.
• Build and maintain excellent working relationships.
• Achievement of financial objectives.
• Engagement and effective management of suppliers/global partners.
• Exceptional operational efficiency.
• To be successful in this role, extensive domestic and international travel will be required.

What you will need:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent.
• Minimum 2 years of experience in related field and industry.
• Project and budget management experience required.
• Beginning to end understanding of live conference production and creative content creation preferred.
• C-Level experience is desirable – communication and project management, etc.
• Agency experience advantageous.
• Excellent interpersonal skills - team player who works well with others, together reaching challenging goals under very tight deadli