Cause-and-Effect Diagram: Unsuccessful Seminar

Your company is hosting a two-day seminar to bring contractors up to speed on the project and ensure an understanding of the roles and responsibilities of all the involved parties. Contactors need to come prepared to discuss their role in the project so that conflicting or omitted roles can be clarified. The last time your company did this, it was a total disaster. Nothing went right. Contractors came late and unprepared, and the participants as well as company management was not happy. Your manager has assigned you as the coordinator of the seminar. He expects you to do a better job that the previous person, and conduct a flawless event. To analyse what went wrong with the previous seminar, you decide to meet with a number of people who were involved and prepare a Cause-and-Effect diagram. Take some time and construct the diagram using your personal experience and imagination about what could go wrong in hosting such a technical event. The effect result of the diagram is ''Unsuccessful seminar" and you can use your own discretion in finding possible major and minor causes by applying the knowledge that you have gained from the topic. Also explain how you will go about prioritising the causes to ensure that you address those causes that have the biggest effect, first. What will be your plan of action in preventing the biggest causes to resurface again during this event?