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On your marks …
The Brisbane Olympic Games presents international opportunities for Australian universities .
By Martin Betts and Jennifer Whyte
The succession of restriction-easing announcements from our most affected states , and the case-free landscape in others , adds to the sense that this might be the end of lockdowns . Talk in universities is of fuller returns to campus , and returning international students .
While most staff may be preoccupied with getting to exams and year ’ s end with a wet sail , leaders and CFOs in particular are looking ahead and breathing a sigh of relief , one suspects . But if this is the end , what is its legacy ? It feels like a time for Australia to reconnect with the world . A world that has opened up , before us , and is significantly more interconnected than we are with it . We better get a move on . This one probably is a race .
One competition that we have won is to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games of 2032 . They are Australia ’ s third Olympics , and first for Queensland . Eleven years may seem a long way away when we have lived with daily turbulence from press conferences , and all staff emails and town hall meetings . But some principles of great project management are to plan early , maximise opportunities and benefits , and anticipate the legacy that a project will leave .
There is a new focus in the delivery of major events in seeing related projects as interventions into existing infrastructure , and using and adapting existing
infrastructure to achieve sustainability targets . The sort of infrastructure and other projects that an Olympics generate include sporting venues , media , accommodation , transportation , logistics , security and water . The opening of an Olympic Games gives an inflexible end-date for delivering a complex program of sustainable infrastructure projects .
For the Sydney 2000 Olympics , researchers studied how to achieve this : the project teams have to both look forward to their ends and visualise the means to achieve them . This can itself feel like a race .
Yet we have learnt from other recent Olympic games that where the focus on ends is narrowly defined , then the investment in these projects can fail to provide wider and longer-term benefits to the host city .
An alternative approach is suggested by the London 2012 Games , which were seen as a means to regenerate East London . Here , the delivery project teams had a strong focus on legacy , despite uncertainty regarding the eventual ownership and uses of venues . This added to the challenge of designing both for Games and for legacy uses , and the handover of infrastructure and its associated information . As in a relay race , a baton is passed from the delivery teams , to the Games operator , to the eventual owners and operators . And can also be passed from one games to the next .
The 2032 Olympics provide an opportunity to showcase Australia , and its universities , to the world . There is a need for new forms of project leadership , and the opportunities that hosting the Olympic
Games offers for Brisbane are to work with local communities , to gain profile on the international stage and to demonstrate what innovative hosting can look like in a new post-COVID world .
Our Australian universities can engage through leveraging their expertise on net-zero , project leadership , and resilience in infrastructure . Olympic organising committees would be well advised to engage with Australian universities – to embed researchers into projects , to take advice from leading experts , and to capture lessons learnt as part of the legacy – in order to take advantage of world-class project expertise .
There is a need for strategic conversations between industry , government , research and policy on how projects are conceived , set-up , delivered and add value . They can draw on worldclass expertise with experience from around the world .
But the opportunities for universities to engage with the games extend far beyond infrastructure and project management . Griffith University ’ s experience as a tier one partner of the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games of 2018 was the first time globally any university had such a deep engagement with a major event of this scale .
A commitment was honoured to the organising committee to provide 500 credit-gaining work-integrated learning internship students from a single new program covering 60 courses over all faculties to their temporary workforce . It was doubled with a further 500 students using the same new learning mechanism with other games partners and suppliers .
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