TABLE OF CONTENTS 
Section 4 covers the fourth stage of the event operations management model. This stage gives us an opportunity to look back on what has happened during the event, correct all that may not have gone as planned and build on what went right. It would be a mistake to think of evaluation merely occurring at the end of an event. The event manager looks on each event as a complete project, and it is not good enough to look at the event only after it has happened; there should be continuous evaluation throughout. The wedding celebrations cannot be repeated the following day, if all did not go as planned. The live concert performance cannot be restaged the next day, due to the event manager not having sufficient staff.
On the event operations management model it appears that evaluation is the last stage of the model, and yet evaluation, analysis and a myriad of decisions occur throughout the staging of an event. We can see evaluation within the analysis stage, the detailed planning stages, during the implementation and again at the review.
As Getz (1997) says, there are three types of evaluation:
Formative evaluation (i.e. part of the analysis stage)
Process evaluation (to improve effectiveness during the event)
Summative evaluation (after the event, to evaluate the impacts and overall value).
It is this last stage that most event managers are concerned with did all go as planned, and...
