The programme of work required to deliver an Olympic and Paralympic Games is vast and complex – with many interdependent workstreams.  It is essential that LOCOG has a clear line of sight between its high level strategy and the day-to-day activities of each of its departments. This requires a robust system for the identification and management of risks and issues to ensure there is a clear reporting procedure across the programme to track against overarching strategic objectives. 

Project deliverables

Deloitte designed and delivered frameworks for progress reporting and risk and issue management, aligning LOCOG’s strategic objectives with specific measures of success.

We also developed a register of key milestones and outcomes, mapped against LOCOG’s four strategic areas, for each of the organisation’s departments and functional areas.

LOCOG’s challenge

Staging the Olympic and Paralympic Games is incredibly complex. The size and scale of the programme is unique and has been described as the “largest peacetime logistical operation” by Seb Coe, Chair of LOCOG.

LOCOG are moving from strategy definition into planning for operational delivery, and the organisation is growing to support this next phase of work. As a result, LOCOG needed to scale its programme management approach centred on providing the right information to the right people across the organisation. And it had to become focused on delivery.

LOCOG had set out its key priorities in the FY09/10 business plan aligned to four strategic areas; delivering games operations, building a delivery organisation, communicating and engagement, and enabling legacy. It was vital to ensure that these priorities were aligned to the programme management processes in place to make sure that work against each of those priorities could be effectively tracked, monitored and assured.

LOCOG is formed of 12 separate departments, each with multiple functional areas focused on specific areas of responsibility - there are many dependencies between them. If the risk profile of one work stream increases, the impact can be felt by a number of others. Managing and mitigating that risk is essential to the delivery of the Games.

What Deloitte did

Deloitte pulled together a team combining specialists in both Operations Consulting and Enterprise Risk to support the Programme Management team at LOCOG.

Drawing on experience of successful programme management, the team’s combined skills enabled us to align the FY09/10 business plan to defined outcomes, integrated with a comprehensive set of deliverables. We also developed templates for progress reporting and risk and issue reporting to enable effective decisions to be made to deal with those risks.

Working with LOCOG’s Executive team, this project required us to summarise a very high volume of complex information into understandable and tangible performance measures, against which LOCOG can gauge success.
 
One of the key outputs has been enabling LOCOG’s Planning and Programme Management Team to provide greater visibility and insight to the LOCOG Executive, as well as assume a more robust assurance role to ensure progress against LOCOG’s strategic plan.

Impact on the Games

The impact of this project will be far reaching. It will help LOCOG identify and manage risks that could be fundamental to the success of the Games, both now and in 2012.

The Games organisers must consider every eventuality, from catastrophic natural events to security alerts, supplier or technology failure, or accidents during the construction phase.  Identification and management of risks is an essential part of any programme, and the unique scale and nature of the Games makes a strong risk and reporting process even more critical.

The benefits of the project will be seen at a number of levels within LOCOG. At the Executive level, the quality and accuracy of information now readily available will allow greater control and enable management to make critical decisions more easily.

Across all levels, there should be a better understanding of the impact of risks on LOCOG’s ability to achieve its objectives, as well as improved prioritisation of the actions which need to be taken to deal with them.