Delivering the Olympic Legacy through the construction programme
Here’s the transcript for this video, as sometimes the audio is hard to hear.
Elizabeth:
I’ve come to the Charing Cross hotel in the middle of London. It’s just raining and I’m here for an Association for Project Management Learning Legacy event about the Olympics. What we’ll be looking at this evening – I hope – is about how the Learning Legacy programme has been set up, and so how things been tracked and monitored so that future projects can learn from them and also a bit about how the construction programme for the Olympic Delivery Authority has worked and has all been brought together to get all the buildings ready for the Olympics which will be here in just a couple of months.
Andrew Bragg:
If you cast your minds back to this day in 1920 and imagine what this day in 1920 was like. Some of you with good memories I’m sure will remember that this when the 7th Games of the 7th Olympiad, were in full flow in Antwerp in Belgium. The games were special for all sorts of different reasons. It was the first time that doves had been released in a symbol of peace and it was the first time that the Olympic flag had been flown.
These games were also very special because they represented a special day. It was the day on which APM’s longest living member was born, and as absolute luck would have it, he’s here in the room tonight.
So I’d like you please to celebrate sustainability in action, by congratulating Sir Reginald Harland, on his 92nd birthday.
Colin Naish:
So, the application of the learning legacy. I’ve pinched this straight off the learning legacy website and it’s something that intrigued me.
So the ODA has provided a model for success that is transferable to UK construction projects. So effectively that’s what I’m doing now, I see myself as a test bed for this. We’re moving from a programme which is mega to regular. It’s billions – a £7bn construction programme – to something that is in the hundreds of millions for transformation. ODA talked about years, I talk about months, it’s an 18 month delivery programme. Effectively we’re moving from ODA to what I’m calling ODA Light. So how can I benefit from the learning legacy? Clearly I was part of it so I know a lot about that but in terms of demonstrating, is it truly transferable?
Karen Elson:
First of all to set the scene, why on earth legacy? Well, we’re on time, we’re on budget, in fact we have savings handed back to government. We’re fit for purpose. We designed for legacy as Colin has just told you and we’re above industry benchmarks as Holly has explained. So we were getting a lot of interest from the industry and professional community as to what we had done differently and can it be replicated for future projects and programmes.
We needed to start thinking about how we were going to collate this into a coordinated structured approach that as a public body we had a duty to gather, collate and disseminate the lessons learned from the games.
Andrew Bragg:
…Proved the worth and value of world class excellence in project management. And I’m going to use the words we’ve heard in the presentations this evening. It really has raised the bar for industry and showcased UK plc.
I think our speakers tonight and the speakers who have spoken in our previous 4 events, some of whom I’m happy to see back in the audience, have really brought great credit both to themselves, also to the profession of project management and also to the UK’s sustainable future. So on every single one of these values please will you join with me in saying thank you for a terrific job well done.
Elizabeth:
I’ve just come out of the learning legacy event. That was the 5th event that APM have done, and the last one. And the purpose of the whole series was to look at all the different lessons that have been learned as a result of the Olympic programme and carry on that knowledge transfer back to industry. And that’s what I realise now – that actually the learning legacy programme run by the Olympic Delivery Authority has come to an end. It finished in October.
What they have been doing since then is working with industry partners from a number of different industries including project management to make sure that the lessons live on. So all the documentation and good practice that was produced as a result of the learning legacy effort for the Olympic programme is transferred, if you like, into industry organisations or industry partners who can then go and implement those lessons in their own environments.
So that was part of the purpose of tonight, for us to hear some of the lessons, nothing that would really make you jump out and say ‘wow, I never thought about doing that’, but it really hammers home the key things that have been a success for them. These include senior sponsorship, good governance and a clear scope – those were probably the 3 things that I took away as critical to make sure that projects are a success. Again, you may know those things already, but it’s a good opportunity to reiterate what actually really does make a tangible success of a project.
