Merlin Project organized the Accelerate 2022

In April 2022, I have had the opportunity to organize an entrepreneurship conference at my university, HHL Graduate School of Management in Leipzig. The event has been a huge success. We raised a total amount of 45.000 EUR and had a great 2-days together with 38 speakers, 15 sponsors and over 300 participants online and on site in Leipzig. The conference revolved around the topic “Shaping a better tomorrow” and attracted students, investors, startups and corporates to join us in Leipzig.

It is common at my university for master's students to organize events during their first semester. In my case, I have – prior to Accelerate – never organized an event of this scale before. Therefore, it has been a huge step out of my comfort zone to take the lead role within the organizing team. In total, I have spent over 350 hours planning the conference besides the existing project deadlines at HHL.

Oftentimes, the double role – as a student at HHL and as Head of Conference at Accelerate – made it necessary to work for 60+ hours per week. Even though this was a great learning experience and a good opportunity to witness consulting working weeks first-hand, I needed to cope with the complexity.

To not lose track of all tasks that needed to be handled, I required additional support to manage all my projects. Merlin Project has been the perfect tool for that cause.

As a thank you to our event sponsor ProjectWizards, I make the project plan we used to organize Accelerate 2022 publicly available. We used Merlin as it’s been a great help to stay on track regarding upcoming deadlines and avoid losing sight of vital tasks.

Without a professional project management tool, me and my team could have easily drowned under the sheer complexity of organizing an event – especially while stemming additional project deadlines as a student at HHL.