Lessons Learned from London 2012

2012 was a huge year for sport in the UK and the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games will undoubtedly remain in people’s memories for many years to come. Even though both events broke boundaries in terms of their unprecedented sporting success, there were a few lessons to be learnt on an organizational level from last summer.

Who can forget the negative news headlines relating to G4S? When news broke last July that the company could not provide enough security guards for the London Olympics, there was last-minute panic to fulfil the workforce shortfall for one of the most high-profile events to grace British shores in decades. The root issue for this shortfall, it was claimed, were problems within the recruitment and deployment processes. Workforce management can be difficult at the best of times, however when the eyes of the world are on you, huge errors like that simply cannot happen.

With around 110,000 people having applied for security jobs at the London 2012 Olympic Games and 50,000 people proceeding to the interview stage, employee scheduling was always going to be a huge task for G4S. There were so many other factors to consider too, including training and security clearance for every employee. Not only was this was a massive project, it was crucial to the success of the Games.

Fortunately the government were able to step in and provide thousands of troops to fill the void left by G4S, but it was clear that the project had been massively underestimated. Identifying the exact needs and scale of this project from the very beginning, along with having the right sort of sport event management software, would have made G4S’s life far easier and saved the company a lot of embarrassment. A complex task it undoubtedly was, but better planning and the right tools could have easily assisted the process and ironed out many of the issues that occurred last summer.

Get Scheduled provides specialist software for volunteer management and workforce management for both large and small events, sporting or otherwise. The specialist software provided allows event organizers and project leaders to schedule staff and volunteers with specific skill sets and allocate appropriate tasks to them. All of this is done on one central cloud system that can be accessed remotely by all employees. One thing that organizers definitely learnt from the London 2012 Olympics is that without adequate preparation and organization, it becomes a significantly harder task to co-ordinate and deploy thousands of staff successfully without any last-minute panicking or glitches.