Read the entry requirements for Sunday’s final as a checklist and something becomes clear. The fan is now part of the operations team.
Tickets exist only inside a mobile app, with QR codes that activate hours before kickoff. Bags must be clear. Suitcases are banned from the stadium and from the trains and shuttles that serve it. Arrive three hours early. Charge your phone fully, carry a portable charger, plan your exit before you’ve entered. Fail any item on the list and the world’s most expensive sporting ticket becomes a rectangle of glass showing 1%.
Each rule is defensible on its own. Digital tickets fight fraud, and this tournament has plenty. Clear bags speed up screening. Early arrival smooths the arrival curve into a rail system carrying double its design load. I’d have signed off on most of these controls myself.
Stack them, though, and look at what’s happened. The operation has quietly outsourced a chunk of its delivery risk to 82,500 untrained volunteers. Every control that protects the system transfers work to the user. One phone that dies in a five-hour window, one dad who didn’t read the bag policy, one family that trusted a ride-share to a venue with no drop-off, and the failure presents at the gate as the customer’s fault. It isn’t. It’s the system’s design, experienced personally.
This is everywhere once you see it. The onboarding process with eleven documents the client must supply in the right format. The self-service portal that saves the vendor money by making the customer do data entry. The change program that works beautifully if every staff member reads a 40-page pack. Designers count the cost of their controls in their own effort and rarely in the aggregate burden landing on the people at the edge, who have no training, no context, and one attempt.
The discipline that fixes it is simple to say. Total the burden. Walk the whole journey as the least-prepared user you’ll realistically get, add up every task you’ve handed them, and then build the recovery paths for the failures you’ve just created. Charging stations at the gates. A resolution desk that can reissue a ticket from ID. Staff briefed that a crying family with a dead phone is a foreseen scenario, not an inconvenience. The Open ran a version of this all week, warning fans that some ticket failures have no retro, and the best events plan the exit as carefully as the entrance.
The measure of Sunday’s design won’t be whether the controls worked. It’ll be what happened to the person for whom they didn’t.
Ben Webb is an Australian project manager and event delivery strategist. He was named AIPM Project Manager of the Year in 2022 and nominated for IPMA World Project Manager of the Year in 2023. He writes about project management, event delivery and leadership at benwebb.au.
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