Project Management the 2010 Winter

Project Management

The 2010 Winter Olympics represent the biggest project in British Columbia since Expo 86. Identify some key risks in any one part of the Olympic project (facilities or infrastructure) and the measures that project managers and politicians are taking to deal with the risks. Will they be effective? Why? Or Why not?

Readying British Columbia for the 2010 Winter Olympics is forcing project managers and politicians to confront the realities of the current state of their existing infrastructure in addition to the necessary improvements to make Vancouver and the surrounding British Columbia area ready in time for the Olympics. The it infrastructure specifically is going to be critical for capturing the results of the athletes' competitions, the revenues generated both for tickets and concessions, and managing both crowds and the intensive level of security being put into place. All of these considerations with regard ot the it infrastructure need to be put into place, all within a limited and relatively tight budget. The constraint of the budget forces the CIO for the it infrastructure of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games to seek out partnerships to alleviate the high costs of creating, sustaining and optimizing the systems architectures that together form the it infrastructure (Sutton 2007). The heavy reliance on partnerships and alliances also ensures that there will be integration across various, and often significantly different, systems to accomplish the many objectives of this aspect of the Olympics' infrastructure. To date, the it Infrastructure Committee has been able to attract Atos Origin, General Electric, Lenovo, Omega, Panasonic, and Samsung.

Given the many internal and external customers for it infrastructure support (Chapin 2007) the need for having a highly synchronized it architectural structure is a very high priority. Figure 1 provides an overview of the proposed it architecture that the 2010 Winter Olympics Committee's CIO is working towards today.

Figure 1: The 2010 Winter Olympics it Architecture

Source: (Chapin 2007)

From the set of assumptions as defined (Chapin 2007) and the approaches taken to mitigate it risks based on using mature, proven and highly adaptable and agile infrastructure technologies, it appears this part of the Winter Olympics project plans are working to both disperse risks through partnerships and make prudent, conservative technological decisions. As a result, there is a relatively high level of probability the it infrastructure and resulting systems and processes based on it will be successful. The combination of anticipating risks and providing a high level of stability with proven, exiting technologies to a well defined set of internal customers greatly increases the probability of success of this project.

Q2. The release of the final Harry Potter book is only a few days away. This project required the coordination of scores of publishers, hundreds of shipping firms and thousands of bookstores. As you might expect with so many parties involved, problems have occurred. (See the article (http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,23663,22,00.html) What approaches have the publishers and the author taken to the project risks that accompany such an eagerly awaited book? Do you think that their approaches to the risks were appropriate? Why?

A product launch on the same level as the Apple iPhone, the latest Harry Potter book has also received global attention and considered one of the major commercial events of the year. The risks from a project management perspective specifically with the book, which is easily copied and placed on the Internet, highlights the challenges of managing the launch of a product that both relies on wide distribution and is easily copied and placed into unintended channels.

The entire supply chain of the book presented specific challenges for managing security, which was the foremost risk involved with this product introduction. Publishers relied on sealed containers with impact-sensitive tape, creation of entirely new RFID labels, and even guards that looked over production runs on a 24/7 basis. All traditional forms of security then were used, yet the breach happened in the area of blogs and file sharing sites, two electronic distribution architectures that have become the dominant method by which many teenagers and adults communicate. The management of risk then by product managers was appropriate in response to anticipated hijacking of entire boxes or even truckloads of books, yet the risks of such a rapid duplication and placement on the Internet was unforeseen, both in terms of magnitude and speed. The challenges for the project managers relative to protecting the digital rights of the book are tough to counter, outside of creating a special ink that cannot be accurately photographed digitally or scanned. To attempt this strategy of creating ink that is not easily duplicable would have significantly increased the production costs, squeezing margins on the book as it moved through distribution channels. The risks of electronic duplication at this point can only be met with litigation against those distributors who violated the embargo, thereby making it possible for those fans wanting to gain notoriety by posting pages before the book was available to get the attention they want, even if it means ruining to books' value. In summary, the project managers did assess and respond to the risks they could foresee, and outside of significantly increasing the production cost, they did mitigate the larger risks of the books being stolen or hijacked in large quantities. The larger threat of digital reproduction and eventual counterfeiting in Asian nations including China would require an entirely different production process that would increase the costs of the books, an entirely different financial risk the publishers probably don't want to take.

Q3. AIDS is a critical issue in southern Africa. In some countries over 1/3 of the adult population infected with HIV. Kona has recently unveiled the Africa Bike project. (http://www.konabiketown.com/)Specially designed bicycles are provided to healthcare workers. In areas with poor roads and little or no public transportation the bicycles have resulted in a huge increase in the number of patients each worker can visit per day. Identify some of the key stakeholders in this project and the partners that Kona had to involve. What role did the stakeholders play in the design of the bicycles and the Bike Town Africa project? (Also see http://www.bicycling.com/article/0,6610,s1-3-12-14517-1,00.html. And http://www.bicycling.com/article/0,6610,s1-3-12-13533-1,00.html