Delivering the 2012 Olympics - food for thought?
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|11:51 UK time, Tuesday, 20 April 2010
Last Tuesday Paul Deighton the CEO of LOCOG (the organising committee for the 2012 Olympics) visited the BBC and shared with us his experience of leading the effort to deliver the greatest show on earth.
His speech provided a thought provoking discourse on how to approach the delivery of 26 world championships involving 11,000 athletes and millions of spectators.
For me, Paul provided a number of insightful observations as to how to effectively lead and manage complex projects. There were many similarities between his challenges and that of the BBC's transformation agenda - a key characteristic being the huge degree of complexity involved.I was struck by his assertion that one should always try and reduce issues to their simplest form.
We do have a tendency to over complicate things in a project environment and in most cases we would be better served to break things down into bitesize chunks.
Another not unrelated remark which resonated with me was 'focus on the stuff that's really important, everything else is secondary'.It reminded me of the Pareto principle - main focus on the 20% of the job that delivers 80% of the benefits.
There were many other interesting points in what was a succinct and energising discourse but I'll draw the line here.
All in all lots of food for thought.
Comment number 1.
At 10:30 30th Apr 2010, lookingnorth wrote:I agree with your inference that the Pareto Principal is the way to efficiency and pace in our resource strapped but is the counter argument that "the devil's in the detail"?
Is the other advantage of the Olympic project that it has a very hard deadline to work to? Elsewhere people are prone to argue that it's worth slipping a little here and there for a better quality end product.
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Comment number 2.
At 05:55 25th Jun 2010, Chris Kane wrote:Thanks to Lookingnorth for making some good points and sorry for not responding sooner!
We need to focus on delivering the bacon and doing so in a pragmatic and professional manner. In Workplace's journey to best practice as a programmes and projects organsiation we need to better shape our projects to truly understand the trade off between the eternal triangle of time,cost and and quality.
It the Brief is fully defined at the outset with say a hard deadline then there is no need for endless debate and the slipping of the delivery deadline !!
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