ABSTRACT
ILLUSTRATIVE CASE: BUSINESS PLANS ARE CONTEXT DEPENDENT
The president and CEO of the 1999 Pan American Games in Winnipeg, Canada, noted that once the rights to hold the event were won in July 1994, he had prepared the business plan, which he then had to significantly change six months later because the situation was not as he had anticipated (personal communication, 5 December 2003). This is not an atypical situation. Even when everything is going “well”, the business plan has to be updated. One key difficulty is forecasting up to seven years in advance how the situation will look for the organizing committee. VANOC circulated its 2007 updated business plan (two years after the initial version). One could see positive and negative changes in many areas. Part of the changes were due to the general situation in which VANOC found itself, as well as to a greater understanding of specific operational needs stemming from the divisional plans having been completed in November 2006 (Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, 2007). While VANOC kept saying that it was “on time and on budget”, the world had other ideas. When the economic recession hit, only months after VANOC had released its revised business plan, VANOC saw its revenues dwindle, putting the “on time, on budget” mantra in jeopardy. A key problem was that the funding for the salaries of some of the paid staff to be hired within the last year was to come from the interest earned by revenues currently in VANOC’s bank accounts. As the interest dropped down to being essentially nonexistent, the number of paid staff needed to be decreased, even if the work was still to be done. One creative solution VANOC used was to ask its partners for employee secondments (loaning). The impact of the recession was reflected in VANOC’s 2009 updated budget (Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, 2009).
