The gold medal you don't want to win

What’s your favorite Olympic memory?

For me, two things come to mind. The first one is close to home & personal. I saw live how my friend & training partner Robert made the finals in Beijing, and cheered my heart out.

The second one was in primary school. My teacher loved speed skating, and he didn’t want to miss any of the highlights.

So he made us a deal.

If there was a final with a Dutch participant during school hours, we’d all cram into the “multi-media room” and watch it live on one of the few analog TVs in the building.

The Dutch won 11 speed skating medals that year, so we spent a lot of time cheering in that room. Great memories.

But few realize that the Olympic games are also a competition in project management.

You see, events like these that are only held once every 4 years have something inherently silly in them…

There’s loads of politics involved in who gets to host such a prestigious event. The result of that is that it rotates. And because it’s a new country and there’s years in between, very few people are part of more than one event.

As a result, there’s limited learning taking place. And while there are piles of lessons learned and protocols for everything, every hosting nation is largely reinventing the wheel.

Pair that with one of the largest groups of stakeholders you can imagine. 10,500 athletes, 200+ countries, the media, the staff - the list is endless.

And then there’s the deadline.

If you remember the newsletter about the 4 core constraints, you know I’m a big fan of fixed deadlines.

It gives you something to optimize for.

But it means that at least some of the other constraints have to be flexible. In this case, quality is as tightly regulated as you can imagine. The IOC has 100s of officials making sure that everything happens by the book, and and army of lawyers to back that up.

The scope is also pretty rigid. No one would run the Olympics without the swimming events because the pool was not ready.

So that leaves us with budget.

Which is where the Olympics are in a league of their own. If there was a podium for budget overruns, the Olympics would fill it.

A few fun facts:

• Every single Olympics since 1960 has gone over budget

• The average cost overrun is 172%, and the median is 118%

• 50% of all games have used more than 2x their initial official budget

And the gold medal? That goes to the Montreal games of 1976. They went over budget by a whopping 720% and ran the games with a half-done stadium.

Now, we both know that not all of that is due to the “eternal beginner syndrome”. There are many other reasons, but reinventing the wheel is an expensive mistake.

Keep that in mind next time you’re starting a project.

Tap into your organization’s formal process for lessons learned (you have that, right?). Try to get a few people with specific experience on your team. Ask outsiders.

Do whatever it takes to use reference class forecasting, as my plumber explained a few weeks ago.

Because if not, we default to the inside view. Which is known to overlook risks and is always too optimistic.

Don’t fall for it.

Because winning an Olympic gold sounds cool.

Until you have to explain to your sponsor, client, and CFO that it’s a gold medal for the biggest budget overrun in history.

Talk soon,
Jasper