In July our team attended the Major Events International Hosts and Federations Summit in Lausanne. Senior leaders from the Milano Cortina 2026 Organising Committee shared lessons from delivering the most geographically distributed Winter Olympic Games in history, an extraordinarily complex undertaking:
Here are our five takeaways and how IPSEM Squared’s BPI service helps manage these better. They apply to most events, not just those at Olympic scale.
The issue: a distributed Games does not mean managing a handful of locations. The real structure was municipalities, provinces, regions and national government, each with different cultures and competing interests. While they had experience in World Cups and World Championships, the Olympics was a new level for them. National government engagement and the top-level steering committee came late, and each region operated differently.
How BPI would help: every layer works from one shared operating picture, driven by a process and approach that is as standardised as possible, providing the same starting point.
How it would mitigate: a single source of truth governs each relationship - responsibilities, milestones, escalation routes and decisions owed - updated in real time.
The impact: better alignment amongst stakeholders, greater visibility of variations and less duplicated effort across a structure that cannot be easily simplified.
The issue: the spread of venues made global or single suppliers hard to secure. Tenders were re-run. Delivery shifted to many smaller local providers, multiplying coordination effort and cost and making consistent service hard to maintain.
How BPI would help: standardised processes, consistent information requirements and flows, and central coordination across a fragmented supplier base, so quality does not depend on any one supplier's scale.
How it would mitigate: every provider works to the same defined standards, tracked from one place, with dependencies and hand-offs visible across the ecosystem.
The impact: consistent delivery, lower coordination overhead and real control across a supplier base built locally, not procured centrally.
The issue: with no benchmark for a distributed Games, some functions were planned and re-planned repeatedly. Some resources were over-provided, some under-provided. Committed value-in-kind was not converted into used capacity.
How BPI would help: standardised service-level definitions, dependency tracking, issue management and real-time visibility of requirement against provision.
How it would mitigate: service levels held (and governed) centrally, not separately by each team. When demand shifts, everyone is made aware.
The impact: right-sized provision, less waste, lower cost and far less rework.
The issue: Functional Areas worked to different datasets without a single shared Games model, governed set of numbers or assumptions. The result was the same organisation presenting conflicting information to external bodies. This is an issue which recurs across multiple editions of the same event.
How BPI would help: this is the problem BPI is built to solve. Our BPI service is founded on looking at how your Processes, People and Information flows can work more effectively. This is overlaid by our Vantica platform to give senior leaders a single source of truth.
How it would mitigate: one version of a controlled set of assumptions - numbers, dates, stakeholder counts, service parameters - that every functional area works to, updated centrally and cascaded immediately.
The impact: everyone aligned from the start, fewer reporting errors, increased confidence in decision making, and lower cost by removing multiple versions of the same information.
The issue: the Organising Committee had to mature from a planning body into a delivery organisation under severe time pressure. The moves that worked - readiness exercises run before plans were complete, an early operations centre to force integration, a single issues system that managed over 4,500 issues - were deliberate and hard-won.
One issues system. Over 4,500 issues managed.
How BPI would help: establishing the right foundation: embedding the processes, structures and issue-and-risk management that make resilience designed-in, not improvised under pressure.
How it would mitigate: structured stages of activity, a live issues and risk system with clear escalation routes, and knowledge retention so what is learned is not lost when the organisation closes.
The impact: a ready, resilient organisation: issues resolved at the right level, delivery held together under pressure, and lessons carried forward.
Our Business Performance Improvement service has been developed specifically for host cities, federations and event organisers.
We don't do a report and leave. We work with you, from root-cause diagnosis to lasting capability and ongoing improvement.
You can find more about our Business Performance Improvement service here. If your event faces challenges like these, contact us to put in place the best way to manage them.