Further Reading: Large-Scale and Multi-Day Production

On the citation tiers, see how-to-use-this-book.md.

Two things before the list.

First, the safety material in §34.5a is the most jurisdiction-dependent content in this book. Risk assessments, method statements, permits to work, structural sign-off, and electrical certification exist almost everywhere and are called different things, are required at different thresholds, and impose different duties. The concepts transfer; the words and the thresholds do not. Find out what applies where you work before you build, because the requirements govern the schedule and the schedule is what you are being asked to write.

Second, the crew figures. Minimum call, turnaround, meal rules, and overtime multipliers are contractual and jurisdictional, and every number in §34.3 is a common shape rather than a standard. Get the terms in writing before you build a schedule around them — the schedule is what triggers the costs, and a planner who has not read the agreement is authorising expenditure they cannot see.

Tier 1 — Verifiable published sources

Event safety and temporary structures

Your national event-safety guidance. In the UK, the Purple Guide to Health, Safety and Welfare at Music and Other Events is the industry standard reference and is not free; in the US, NFPA 101 (life safety), local fire-marshal requirements, and OSHA general-duty obligations apply; Australia, Canada, and most of the EU have direct equivalents. Read the sections on temporary demountable structures, crowd management, and electrical installations at least once properly.
Guidance on temporary demountable structures from your national engineering or events body. §34.5a's structural sign-off is not a formality — a marquee, a stage, and a rigged element are engineered objects with wind loadings and a competent person attached to them.
Any current material on permits to work, from construction or industrial practice. Events borrow the concept and frequently apply it loosely, and the industrial version is the one worth learning.
Rigging standards and codes of practice from your national entertainment-technology body. A planner does not need to rig. A planner does need to know why a rigger's refusal is not a negotiation.

Scheduling, critical path, and why builds run late

Any introduction to critical path method (CPM) and PERT. §34.2a's dependency map is CPM without the software, and knowing the formal version tells you what you are approximating. The concepts of float, the critical path, and resource levelling are all directly applicable.
Goldratt, Eliyahu. Critical Chain. Contentious and useful. Its central observation — that safety margins added to individual tasks get consumed and that margin should be pooled at the end — is exactly §34.2's dark day argument, and it is a better justification for it than the chapter gives.
Any work on the planning fallacy — Kahneman and Tversky, and the reference class forecasting literature that came out of it. "Strike is 40–60% and everybody plans 25%" is the planning fallacy with a specific number attached, and the fix — estimate from what comparable builds actually took, not from what this one should take — is reference class forecasting.
Construction scheduling practice, generally. Events are a short, fast construction project with a hard deadline and no snagging period, and the construction literature has thought about it far longer.

Crew, labour, and welfare

Your local labour agreements and rate cards. In the US, IATSE local agreements; elsewhere, the equivalent union or supplier terms. The specific numbers are the point.
Any current work on fatigue and shift work in safety-critical settings — aviation, medicine, maritime, rail. §34.3's turnaround rule is a weak version of what those industries mandate, and Case Study 34.1's nine-hour turnaround is the kind of thing they would treat as a reportable event.
Material on lone working, working at height, and manual handling from your national safety regulator. Free, short, and directly applicable.

Utilities at scale

Any temporary power design guide from a generator supplier or an electrical trade body. Diversity factors, load calculation, distribution, and earthing arrangements for temporary installations. The earthing question is not in this chapter and it matters.
Your jurisdiction's sanitation ratios for temporary events. Many regulate this and the requirement is frequently stricter than §34.5's guide.
Any material on potable water provision for temporary events, including testing requirements where they apply.

Crowds and circulation

Fruin, John J. Pedestrian Planning and Design. The founding work on levels of service and pedestrian flow rates. §34.6's circulation rules are a crude version and Fruin is the real thing.
Still, G. Keith, on crowd science and crowd modelling — and the DIM-ICE and RAMP frameworks are directly usable at event scale.
Any published investigation into a crowd incident. These are hard reading and they are the most useful material in this list, because the failures are almost never a single decision — they are circulation, ingress, and information failures compounding.

Tier 2 — Attributed professional practice

The supply-chain threshold, and the seven diagnostics. The author's framing. D.1 asks whether the threshold is really about size, and the honest answer is that it is about dependency and shared access, which correlate with size imperfectly.
The five phases and the dark day. Practice, and Critical Chain is a better argument for the dark day than this chapter makes.
The dependency-map method. CPM, informally. The claim that it takes forty to fifty minutes is an estimate.
The crew ratios in §34.3. Starting points for a conversation with a production manager, not planning figures to build against. The dock/no-dock ratio is the one the author is most confident about and it is still a range.
"Strike is 40–60% and everybody plans 25%." Practice, widely held, and worth measuring on your own events.
The marshalling plan's contents, and "how does it get out?"
The channel plan and the rule about channel 1. Practice.
The site-plan rules. The 4-metre emergency lane is a common figure; your jurisdiction may specify a different one and it will be a legal requirement rather than a recommendation.
The walked-forward production meeting. The author's strongest single technique in the chapter — and it is the format, not the frequency, that does the work.
§34.8's "you do not direct them, you sequence them." Practice, and it is the sentence wedding planners moving into production most need.
The six day-two failure modes and the overnight reset. The author's, and D.7 correctly asks what the list misses — the most obvious omission is the accumulation of undocumented changes, where day one's on-site fixes are in nobody's document by day three.

Tier 3 — Illustrative and constructed

All case-study material. Fenwick Dray and the Hallowmere wedding; Northwind's build, its dependency map, and every hour in it. Constructed.

Three specific notes.

Case Study 34.1's $9,500 is a plausible shape rather than a record, and its DQ4 concedes two ways in which the rebuilt schedule is optimistic — the marquee company's Friday return is not free, and the rebuild has no dark period either.

Case Study 34.2's arithmetic is internally consistent and one deliberate error is left visible in it. "Eleven hours short" adds four hours of missing path contingency to seven crew-hours of Wednesday capacity — two different units, added together in a meeting by people in a hurry. The chapter names this as an instance of its own recurring error rather than quietly fixing it, because the same mistake in a real production meeting would go unnoticed and would produce a schedule that closes on paper and fails on site.

And Case Study 34.2's DQ5 identifies the third instance in three chapters of a quantity derived from the wrong unit — the barn that seated 89 for a dinner (Ch.28), the wine pull scoped from a merchant's willingness (Ch.32), and tape scoped per day rather than per crew-hour. The fix is the same every time: write the unit next to the number.

Where to go next

Draw a dependency map for the next event you plan, whatever its size (B.2). Forty minutes, and you will find something.

Then go and find one venue's dock height, dock width, turning circle, and exit (C.1). Note which of the four they have to go and check — it is usually the fourth, and it is the one that produces courtyards with no way out.

Ask a production manager what planners get wrong on a build (C.5). The answers cluster, and they will be about order rather than about effort.

Read one crowd-incident investigation. It is unpleasant and it is the most useful thing on this list.

And read Critical Chain if you have ever had a client ask you to remove the dark day. You will have a better answer than "trust me."

Chapter 35 preview

Sustainability — what all of this costs something other than money, and it closes Part VII.

Bring this chapter's arithmetic. Chapter 35's argument is that most event sustainability is theatre, that the real numbers are dominated by two things nobody puts on a checklist, and that a planner who knows which two can do more in one decision than in a hundred compostable forks.

One of the two is in this chapter already, and Chapter 33 is full of the other.