An Olympic torch

Well hat's off to The Times CEO summit for aiming to identify the success factors behind the delivery of the Olympic Park.  I would have been more impressed had this been a government led review of lessons learnt, but nevertheless this is a start.

The key success factors identified by Sir keith Mills, deputy chairman London Olympic Organising Committee where:

"From the bid [process] to today, we had the right team in place and have demonstrated competency to complete what is an immensely complex project.  The Government had confidence that we knew what we were doing because we built confidence by delivering...  Buy into a vision, find the right people, give them the money and get on with it"

Fairly obvious lessons which you would expect.  Would you be surprised if a project or programme failed if it had the wrong team, lack of competency, lack of stakeholder confidence, the wrong team, and insufficient money?

'Letting them get on with it' causes me a little bit of a problem though - surely he also meant to say the right governance structure.

Now, can we progress from the strengths to the lessons learnt from the many things which didn't go according to plan, starting with the budget, ...


Background reading;
Hepwell, D. and Asthana, A. (2012) 'Ministers 'can learn from Olympic delivery success'', The Times, 12 June, p.13