The landscape is changing. The groundswell of Social Media (SM) is upon us and it’s changing the playing field in almost every industry, the world of IT Project Management (ITPM) is not exempt. Now IT Project Manager’s have a real-time gage on how well their projects are performing. This is certainly not in all cases, but when we consider the recent failure of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic ticketing site there is a clear indication in the social space of when things began to go sideways.
Background
In January 2008 Tickets.com won the contract to manage the ticket sales for the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. "Tickets.com has an impressive track record and extensive Olympic ticketing experience, having managed the successful ticketing programs for the Atlanta 1996 Summer Games, and the Salt Lake 2002 Winter Games. Tickets.com's Olympic ticketing engine was also the backbone for ticket sales and distribution for the Sydney 2000 Summer Games and the Torino 2006 Winter Games." 1
Tickets.com has a great deal of experience in the management of ticket sales. The only thing that I could see as being different is the use of a Virtual Waiting Room (VWR). After performing a few searches I’ve found that the VWR is actually quite a common tool - though it is certainly on loved by users. Dubbed the “worst kind of waiting room” by most bloggers - it’s a holding patter that offers little more consolation that the elevator music of years gone by.
This quote from Tickets.com’s own site: “The virtual waiting room helps manage the incredible amount of traffic,” said Carl Rice, senior director, information systems and special projects, Chicago Cubs.2 Suggests that their solution is a great answer to the problem of high online ticket volume. One might suggest that this tool was not the problem at all. - But I digress
Using SM in ITPM
This is really a focus on the SM tools available to track issues with the launch of your project. As the Ticketing system began to fail people started to share their frustration. If you were to search Twitter for “Olympic Tickets”3 as I did on the 8th of November you will quickly find masses of people expressing their frustration with the site in question. Some of the quotes found were:”Glad I don't work in IT for Olympic ticket sales.”, “If U2 can serve video of a concert to the world in real time, Vanoc should be able to handle Olympic tickets.”, “Has anyone been successful getting Olympic tickets this morning?”, “Olympic tickets done for the day, maybe will try again tomorrow. Major FAIL”
Fortunately for VANOC, they were paying attention to these comments. At 10:12 they said “Hang in there folks, lots of traffic on the tix site today.” At 10:28 “Folks, we're aware of the issue on the tix site and hope to have that solved shortly. Hang in there - its a very popular site today.”, then a few minutes later at 10:31 “Fans - making some progress on the tix site. Its getting better. Hang in there.” Unfortunately the next time there was communication was at 1:18 when they said “Tix postponed to Nov 14 http://bit.ly/1mTfds” With this link to a more detailed message entitled: Vancouver 2010 Phase 3 Ticket Sales postponed to November 14.
If you are going to listen and talk back - be sure you keep the conversation going even if you don’t have any good news. It’s ok to say “We still don’t know what’s wrong - but we’re working on it.”
VANOC was able to keep users informed while they worked on a solution. Could they have done better? Yes. Three hours between postings in a real time space like Twitter is far too long particularly when people are wasting their time sitting in your VWR - was there even any music?
- http://provenue.tickets.com/US/about_us/press/PR012408.shtml
- http://provenue.tickets.com/US/about_us/case_studies/cs_06.shtml
- http://twitter.com/#search?q=Olympic%20Tickets
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