For event organizers, months before the doors open
Work BackPlan from the doors, not from today.
Enter your doors-open date and each track's milestones. Free in your browser: every milestone counted in weeks before the doors, each track's owner and last milestone, every dependency between tracks checked on both sides, the ones your plan implies but never states, a latest-safe date for every deposit and order, and checkpoints that say what happens when they fail. A run writes the plan memo, or the checkpoint sheet for your track owners.
1 The event and its plan free
2 The plan, worked back free
What the page flags
Tracks - right to left from the doors
Gates - both sides named
Commitments - held to the latest safe date
Checkpoints - date, condition, action, owner
Granularity, buffers, replanning
3 Plan memo or checkpoint sheet metered
Pricing as soon as the session is ready...
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Anchor and granularity
Tracks
Gates
Gates to add
Commitments
Buffers and replanning
Levers, in order
Plan gates
Record
Caveats
The page's check of this reply
4 Saved plans
How it works
Planning forward from today discovers the venue or CFP lead time only when it is too late. This page works every track back from doors-open and counts each milestone in weeks before the doors (S-4 is four weeks out), so the plan carries over to next edition. Tracks run in parallel and meet only at gates, and a gate names both milestones - "sponsors depend on budget" is not one. Some gates every event has: the date is never announced before the team can take money, speakers are confirmed before the program is announced, and headcount freezes before the catering order.
Buffers sit on irreversible commitments: each deposit or order is held open until its latest safe date, because adding plates late is cheap and unwinding a deposit is not. When the budget leans on revenue not yet booked, Good, Better and Best versions are costed before a ticket sells. A checkpoint is a date, one check, the action that fires on failure and who executes it - without the action it is a status meeting. Once the date is announced it holds, and scope moves instead.