Collaboration Project: Olympic Games

One of the downsides of doing collaborative work on a project by project basis is that I don’t always get to see the results of the work on a longer term basis. I will help an organization get a program started or help frame and make progress against a wicked problem and then I’ll usually move on to the next thing. Often times I can’t really talk about the projects I work on due to confidentiality issues. But one project that I had the pleasure to work on regularly for a few years was the technology strategy and planning for the Olympic Games in Vancouver. And now that multi-year project has finally come to fruition.

The Vancouver Sun published an article on January 24th highlighting how the technology that will underpin the Games’ results, television broadcast, staffing and back office functions is ready to go a year in advance. The article alludes to how the team started off small and skunkworky, out of the top floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery.

We worked in small groups, large groups and individually for a period of months developing narrative, financial and visual models of possible solutions even as the world was shifting under our feet with respect to changing technological and political landscapes. We did scenario planning around what our competition would do and say. We tried to think of what some of the outlier competitors might do (eg. “What if Cisco went after the sponsorship?) We looked at sustainability issues and evaluated the project from a “Triple Bottom Line” perspective.

The reason we did all of this is because the Olympic organizations, local organizing committees and the IOC, are extremely risk averse. They don’t want any organizations or technology that aren’t completely reliable. 99.999999% reliable. Being the Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC) in British Columbia meant that we weren’t the 100 year old phone company like we were in Ontario and didn’t have the decades of infrastructure to back up the bid.

This meant that we had to bring the brightest people together to devise a solution to an opportunity that we didn’t fully understand for an event that was years away. These aren’t they types of problems that you solve in traditional organizational ways. The key to developing the winning solution was making assumptions on design, constantly testing those assumptions and having the flexibility and vision to be able to iterate and change very quickly. In essence, not only was the technology designed, but the way in which we worked was designed. It was a powerful way of working and the team has grown a lot since the early days but there has been very little turnover and I’m proud to say that elements of working collaboratively have become part of the team’s modus operandi.

In the Vancouver Sun video below, Norm Silins, the General Manager of the telecom solution for Bell Canada and the first person to begin work on the project displays the results of the collaborative work as he shows off the telecom gear that will power the Olympics Games in Vancouver.