By this time next week, tens of thousands of people who ran the biggest events on earth this month will be doing something else entirely. The Wimbledon stewards are back in their day jobs. The Open’s marshals have hung up their bibs. The World Cup’s city armies are dissolving across a continent. The Tour’s convoy crews get a few weeks before the Vuelta calls.
Every one of those events faced the same impossible staffing equation. You need thousands of competent people for a fortnight, and you cannot employ thousands of people year-round to get them. Four institutions, four solutions, and the differences are a masterclass in temporary capability.
Wimbledon runs a surge model. A small permanent staff swells enormously for the championships, and the trick is that the surge is substantially the same people every year. Honorary stewards return for decades. Ballboys and ballgirls are trained through a months-long school program. Court coverers, service staff and security largely repeat. The workforce is temporary in employment terms and permanent in knowledge terms, which is how the Queue works like an institution rather than an improvisation.
The Open runs a volunteer model with a travelling core. Thousands of marshals give their time for the championship, organised around a compact professional operations team that moves venue to venue with the rota. Volunteers bring local knowledge and goodwill money can’t buy. The professional core brings the playbook. Neither works alone.
The Tour carries its workforce. The convoy is the payroll: drivers, builders, timing crews, broadcast, hospitality, all travelling for three weeks as a relocating city. Nothing is recruited locally except police and barriers. Maximum consistency, maximum cost, and the only model that works when your venue changes daily.
The World Cup raised armies. Sixteen host cities, each recruiting, training and badging thousands of volunteers and contractors who had never worked a World Cup before and mostly never will again. It’s the only model that reaches that scale, and it’s the model that produces first-night problems, because the workforce meets the event for the first time when the event starts. The stadium crews were the exception, inherited with the buildings, and that inheritance carried the tournament.
Almost every project faces a version of this equation. Delivery needs a capability spike your organisation can’t hold permanently: the testers in the final quarter, the change managers at go-live, the trades in the fit-out month. And most organisations solve it badly, hiring contractors as late as possible, treating them as interchangeable, and losing everything they learned the day the invoice stops.
The four models offer better options, and the choice turns on two questions. How often will you need this capability again, and how much context does it need to perform? Recurring need with high context wants the Wimbledon model: build a returning bench, pay the premium to keep alumni warm, treat re-engagement as cheaper than recruitment because it is. Recurring need with a moving site wants the Open model: a small owned core carrying the method, surrounded by capacity sourced fresh each time. Continuous intense delivery wants the Tour model, everything in-house and travelling, and you accept the cost. One-off scale wants the World Cup model, and if that’s yours, invest disproportionately in training, rehearsal and the few inherited veterans who’ve done it before, because they’re the only institutional memory in the building.
The mistake is treating temporary people as a procurement category instead of a capability decision. A fortnight workforce can carry decades of knowledge or none. That’s chosen, months earlier, by whoever designs how the surge gets sourced.
Your next project has a surge coming. Which of the four models is it running? And is that a decision someone made, or just what the budget defaulted to?
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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