Today Craig Madigan, Cleanevent’s Project Manager for all 7 mountain venues, came and spent about an hour with us.
One thing we talked with Scott about before Craig arrived was the reading assignment for the day, about In-House versus Contract services. Craig explained that VANOC looked two separate modules for contracting cleaning services – one for the city of Vancouver, and the other for the mountain venues of Whistler. When looking at it from this perspective, the main difference is that just about every mountain venue had to be built, and most are temporary, whereas the city venues were previously established with existing staff.
Stemming from the consideration of staff, which – let’s face it – is huge in the event industry, Vancouver also had a larger pool of workers that made it easier to simply bolster the venues’ existing cleaning crews. The local population in Whistler, however, was drastically different. Whistler locals’ lifestyle was simply not reliable enough to be compatible with Cleanevent’s needs. This is a wealthy area driven by the ski slopes, so the kids here aged 18-25 don’t need to work and would rather skiing or snowboarding all day.
Based on those considerations, it made sense for VANOC to contract out almost everything in the mountain venues, essentially buying a solution to the complications presented here.
We also talked about resident perception of the Games. In Whistler, for instance, most of the locals wanted a way out because of concerns over things like safety and traffic. They also had the option to rent out their businesses to VANOC, rent out their residences to spectators, and take off on a month’s paid vacation. Scott admitted that hosting the Olympics is financially an endeavor that just doesn’t work, but if the community is willing to do it they can have a lot of fun.
Our next topic of discussion was some of the function teams involved in putting on the Olympics. Staying with Cleanevent right now is a Russian guy named Maxim who is representing the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games. He is on what’s called the Overlay Team, whose responsibility is to design all the Olympic buildings in CAD and then supervise the custom-building of all the venues and support buildings. The Overlay Team owns and controls the venues for about three years before the event, and in a short period of time before the Games they turn it over to the Operations. During his time at these Games, Maxim is looking at all the short-comings of the planning to see how Sochi can avoid the same mistakes.
There is also something called the “Look” department. These people are in charge of dressing everything in banners and flags and drapes on the scaffolding. They also worked out all the ultra-specific colors chemes and uniforms and other visual marketing. Scott kept referring to all this as the “frosting”.
The last group we talked about were the Wayfinders. This crew is in charge of all Olympic signage/directions/arrows to direct the spectators with all the knowledge they need to get to and around within the venues. They must do the majority of their work from Overlay’s CAD design, and then only have a couple weeks to make last-minute adjustments, sizing, extra considerations.
In the last 2-3 weeks leading up to the Games, a lot of the planning must be adjusted as unforeseeable circumstances rear their ugly heads. For example, when Look designs and sizes their grandstand drapes, they plan for a certain height of snow – which just isn't here in Whistler. The Wayfinding team also has to make adjustments as people begin to come to the venues and report oversights in the signage.
This is a good example of a calculation that the Look department made when creating the signage - they were counting on a few inches of snow to cover the bottom of the fencing.
A lot of things have to happen really fast around here. On our initial tour Joey was pointing out entire buildings that were not there just a few days before. The Media Center, which overtook the Whistler Conference Center, was not even made available to VANOC until January 3rd. Craig was telling us that 12 months of planning for an event like this is ideal, but he didn't get here until May of last year.
The last thing Craig talked about was working for Cleanevent as a whole, including the other large events they work for. They are currently bidding for the contract for the Commonwealth Games in Delhi; they submitted the bid around 212 days before the game, but they would have liked to have had that done 300 days before that! The Commonwealth Games are one of the biggest event for Cleanevent, managing 50 venues and requiring 1 million manhours of work. The Summer Olympics require 1.7 million, the Winter Olympics need 120,000, and the Asian Games take 650,000 manhours to clean the venues throughout the entire period. It's quite difficult to imagine, wouldn't you agree!?
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