PM Network - February 2017

streamline project delivery by connecting teams across countries.

Ms. Dias says one of her first assignments as the head of the Rio 2016 technology program office was to travel to London, England and Sochi, Russia to meet with her counterparts for those games. She was able to review documents and project plans, and even participated in some of the testing phases for those games through IOC-backed knowledge transfer programs.

“It was helpful to observe their program management practices and to share best practices,” Ms. Dias says. She brought back many project management tools, including a plan to centralize the PMO and a strategy to bring stakeholders from interrelated project teams together into working groups at the outset of the project.

In turn, Ms. Dias hosted her counterparts from future host cities in South Korea and Japan, offering signposts for balancing risk management and innovation in project delivery. The Pyeongchang Organizing Committee for the 2018 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (POCOG) sent 167 people to Brazil to observe the operations and activities of different functional areas during the

2016 games. A total of 600 representatives from the Pyeongchang 2018, Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022 committees, as well as delegates from other bid cities like Paris and Los Angeles, went to Rio de Janeiro.

“The Rio games were an invaluable chance for all of us to experience and learn,” says Jihye Lee, head of international media relations, POCOG, Pyeongchang, South Korea. (See “South Korea Gears Up,” page 35, for how POCOG is approaching the 2018 games.)

AFTER THE CLOSING CEREMONY

With many communities unsure of the long-term value of hosting the Olympics, project teams must carefully plan how venues will be used once the games end, says Stefan Timmermans, who has worked on several Olympics projects. He most recently served as senior program manager for venue technology for the Rio 2016 Organizing Committee.

“Decisions about the legacy use of venues must be made at the beginning, when you are defining your overall strategy for the project,” says Mr. Timmermans, Huijbergen, the Netherlands. (Partly to reassure skeptical stakeholders, cities are making the long-term role of Olympic facilities part of the bidding process; see “California Dreaming,” page 37.)

Many cities have made the expensive mistake of building massive sports venues without crafting a realistic long-term plan. To position Sochi as a world-class winter sports destination, for example, Russia built a US$300 million ski jump and a US$8.5 billion rail link connecting the town to the Black Sea coast. These facilities now sit largely idle; Russia’s national ski team uses the ski jump.

Other cities have seen long-term benefits from hosting the games by repurposing facilities and sparking urban redevelopment. London’s conversion of its 560-acre (227-hectare) Olympic Park into a tourist attraction is part of a more than £500 million transformation program that includes add-