Operations management principles and practices

Operations Management

To the Organizers of this Major Sporting Event:

At this present juncture of your endeavors, of course all of you are experiencing the inevitable pre-event jitters -- do we have enough sponsors, will all of the athletes 'come through' with their major commitments, etc. Perhaps you are even worried about prospective wardrobe failures of the event's halftime show. However, although good publicity and cooperation from all the necessary parties concerned certainly plays into the managing of a successful event, a sound theoretical overview and organizational paradigm can be helpful to have as an additional form of damage control.

When all things do not go as swimmingly as desired, or things need to be rescheduled more tightly, Critical Path Analysis is helpful. In fact, from the very onset of organizing a time-dependent event, Critical Path Analysis is one of the most effective time management paradigms an organization can employ. Critical Path Analysis is a powerful tool to help organizers to schedule and manage any complex project -- which a major sporting event certainly can be classified as, given its many component organizational parts and networks of operations. Critical Path Analysis or CPA as it is often called was developed in the 1950s in America by the government to control large contractual defense projects, and often the management of a large sporting event can indeed feel like a battlefield campaign.

Critical Path Analysis was designed as a method of spatial planning for all tasks that must be completed as part of a potential project and to act as a basis for the preparation of schedules as well as for resource planning and deployment over the course of a project's evolution in time. During management of a project, CPA demands the constant and regular monitoring of achievement of specific, timely project goals. Such an approach is designed to strategically prevent delays in scheduling so that actions can be taken immediately to get a project back on its designated and specific course.

CPA is thus ideal for planning a sporting event because there are so many different timetables for the different elements -- coordinating the televised sponsorship, halftime events, the stadium management and crowd control, even taking precautions against terrorist activities in this day and age of political uncertainty. And that list of different schedules alone does not take into consideration the management of the coaches, handlers, and members of the teams in question.

The benefit of using Critical Path Analysis is that it formally identifies tasks that must be completed on time. This enables the whole project to be completed on time, so that critical but small parts of the project do not hold up other parts of the project.

The CPA technique also identifies tasks can be delayed for a while if resource needs to be reallocated to catch up on missed tasks. It thus clearly identifies the minimum length of time needed to complete a project. To accelerate the overall timetable of the project, doing a CPA analysis can also help identify which project steps should be accelerated to complete the project within the available time when attempting to minimize costs.