What I hope’s been done is running a system test on each separate reg area/method to determine what the average time to process a member is. Then keep track of how many people are trying to register at various times (i.e. obviously start of show/start of day is going to have a lot more than at 3 p.m. on Saturday). Work backwards from there as to how many people you need to have working registration to process people in a reasonable amount of time. If your average time to process a membership (and remember to test for non-perfect scenarios; someone has to fumble for their bar code and get their ID out rather than having it ready, someone’s paying by credit card, someone’s paying by cash but needs change, etc.) is too long, try to rethink the system (i.e. the year or three when they were printing out the pro badges on the spot and they yelling out names to distribute them at a separate point didn’t work too well…).

Then plan for disasters. For example, I’m assuming the bar code is linked to a computer database. Make sure that database is still accessible if a) a computer it’s on goes down b) a network goes down c) power goes down d) whatever else I’m not thinking of in 5 seconds of thought about it.