The team that won the 2012 Olympics has been rightly praised but, warns Matt Dathan of PA Consulting, the real challenges start now. Chief among them is ensuring that the demands to produce a spectacular show in seven years’ time do not eclipse the need to provide value for many years to come
The London 2012 team confounded the critics to win the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games by promising to deliver a magical games and lasting legacy. The team now faces the problem at the heart of every Olympics: how to ensure the promised legacy in the face of ever-mounting pressures to deliver a spectacular games in front of watching millions.
Having been involved in the Sydney Olympics, widely hailed as the best ever games, PA Consulting Group has direct experience of how to overcome this most complex of challenges, in terms of size, organisation, technology, integration and socio-economic impact.
At the risk of sounding heretical, sport is not the only priority: delivering the promised legacy benefits is about sticking to classic programme management principles. So what should the London team be doing now to protect these benefits against the inevitable delivery pressures?
Lord Coe captivated the International Olympic Committee in Singapore by presenting a wonderful vision for London’s games. However, there is a world of difference between concept designs and delivery on the ground. London 2012 must now turn these concepts into a coherent plan. In many cases, these will have to be negotiated and built from scratch – and it will be the tried-and-tested methods for defining scope, creating work-breakdown structures and detailed schedule planning that will make this process successful.
PA Consulting helped Sydney in this area and our work was in two phases: the transformation of the Olympic plan into an integrated programme of work, and the development of detailed plans to convert the integrated programme into 24 streams of work, each a major project in its own right.
A key part of this process will be ensuring the ongoing involvement of central government. With such a wide range of departments, agencies, local authorities and private partners to coordinate, cajole and coerce, only the government has the power to really make things happen. It must remain intimately linked to the actual delivery of the games. A lesson from other Olympics is that future political expediency could easily undo promises made by the government today. The challenge for London will be to ensure the commitment continues right up to the games, and beyond.
The Olympics and Paralympics only last for two weeks each so it should be self-evident that the sporting and other infrastructure that remain should suit the needs of the communities within which they lie. However, under pressure to deliver a stunning games, all too often cities end up lumbering themselves with white elephants. Despite the success of the Sydney Games, the New South Wales government is now stuck with Stadium Australia and the neighbouring Superdome facility, which it has to subsidise for the foreseeable future.
The challenge is to ensure that, at the planning stage, all relevant stakeholders are involved. For example, the Olympic Village will be seen by the local authority as new houses and community facilities and by organisers as athlete accommodation. Others will see it as an opportunity to showcase the latest environmentally friendly technology while the security authorities will want to ensure it is as easy to protect as possible.
It is a tricky balancing act – as illustrated in Athens where the local authorities lost many months bickering over which venues should be built in their area. The solution is careful stakeholder management, where realism must by maintained and deals brokered to ensure delivery in good time.
Alongside the development of the master plans, another challenge will be to ensure that all parts mesh together to deliver a coherent result. Again, Greece offers an example of how it can go wrong: even though they needed 25,000 extra hotel rooms in Athens, the Greek government had still failed to lift a ban on new hotel construction three years into the project.
The Olympic programme is going to spend a lot of money on an event that has an immovable deadline of 27 July 2012. Once plans have been authorised, partners contracted to work and things start to happen, the overall management team must be able to track progress, anticipate problems and ensure the funds are properly spent. Stories abound of how Olympic budgets ballooned as the delivery deadline approached and organisers were frustrated at the lack of progress.
A key lesson is that no programme of this complexity is going to run smoothly so organisers need to know how to minimise the impact of any problem – and spotting them before they happen is the best way to achieve this. A New South Wales government audit report in 1999 highlighted the fact that the Sydney budget had grown by AU$1bn because the “agencies concerned with planning for the games have now a greater appreciation of the complexity and extent of the task”. The implication was that the organisers did not realise just how complex the games programme was going to be.
Tough, independent delivery assurance will give the organisers confidence that what has been promised by the myriad of suppliers is actually being delivered. This means early-warning and escalation procedures, specialist peer reviews and audits, backed up by predictive models.
Despite inconclusive evidence on the long-term benefits of hosting major sporting events, a lasting legacy is understandably given top billing in bids to persuade the taxpaying public that it will all be worth it. The challenge for London is that the wider benefits – such as a healthier population or a regenerated community – will depend on factors outside the direct control of the organisers. It is another reason to secure the input of all relevant stakeholders at the earliest stage.
London will certainly host a magical games in 2012, but the real benefit of hosting the Olympics lies in what can be achieved in the years leading up to the event and in the years following. The success of London’s bid already demonstrates that those charged with ensuring its success have started out along the right path.
