TEAM 2000 UPDATE

Team 2000 has now been awarded 25 contracts for the cleaning of Olympic venues. We have million dollar events at Stadium Australia including the opening and closing ceremonies and the athletics. This also includes the Common Domain, which is the public "spine" that links the venues at Sydney Olympic Park. Even the smaller events at the Velodrome, the Water Polo and Shooting are $100,000 plus. To date, our contract revenue is some $10 million (mostly in September and October) and will soon become some $13.5 million with scope creep.

The Games is a big effort for our client SOCOG, who has responsibility for putting on the Games. SOCOG has some 40 functional areas with cleaning and waste being managed in the same pool as catering.

Cleanevent has now selected its Venue Cleaning Managers. All of them have visited their venues at least four times and have participated in the development of their Operational Plans - the document that details the resources needed to do the job, and the script of how it will be done.

The last weekend of June comprised a massive training exercise for the next level of managers. The "Inner Circle" is a name drawn from the Olympic rings and used to label the area managers for each venue. The Inner Circle area managers, with their crews averaging 10 staff, will be the front line in achieving our success.

The Inner Circle training was a full week. There were three days with Venue Cleaning Managers and many of the night managers came for Friday. Over the Saturday and Sunday more than 200 staff were present. Training included lectures, demonstrations, workgroups and finally, the on site walking of the areas that they will have responsibility for.

The massive size of the Olympic effort, and the fact that we will be working at nearly 30 sites simultaneously means we require a degree of professionalism not needed before within Cleanevent. Therefore, this requires more training and more documentation. The event administrators, under Sarah Hinman, have produced Operational Plans for every venue and scripts for each area within a venue.

In addition, we are developing more tools that will be legacy for the future. Lynne Williams has joined as IT Manager with immediate impact in finally getting the ISDN network running so the Sydney, Melbourne and SOCOG offices of Cleanevent form one Virtual Private Network. Further, we have now improved the functionality and reporting from the recruitment database, and the roster database, which will give new options for the way Cleanevent does business in future.

But some things will never change. It is a pity that "what goes on on the footy trip, stays on the footy trip" – suffice to say that if the stories from the Inner Circle weekend could be told, then it would be clear that the Cleanevent traditions live on.