Learn from the Olympics How to Organize your Events: Part 1 of 3 - Planning Event Logistics

With the Winter Olympic Games in Torino underway, on time and over budget, it feels like a good time to take a minute and look at the lessons the Olympics have to teach us about managing events. To be fair, the Olympics are a massive set of groups with multiple venues hosting simultaneous events with visitors from all over the world. To make matters worse, you only get to do it once, you prepare for years leading up to it, when it arrives you try the best that you can to control the chaos for just over 2 nonstop weeks and then, in a blink of an eye, it is over. While there is a chance that your children or grandchildren will be involved in hosting the Games again, for most people involved there is no next time.

It is still too soon to look closely at what has and has not worked for the Winter Games in Torino. It is not until all the smoke has cleared that they will know how the event really went. I did however, have the good fortune of being involved with hosting the Salt Lake Winter Games (2002) while I was a college student in Provo, UT. Those Olympics are now four years old and time has given us a great perspective to glean some valuable lessons from them and the way that they were managed.

For the sake of learning, let