Background
The Georgia Dome has operated as a highly successful major events venue for over eleven years having hosted the Super Bowl, Olympic Games, Final Four, Atlanta Falcons, SEC Football Championship and many other high profile events. The Dome’s management team is arguably one of the nation’s most experienced management teams in terms of the events and issues they have faced. Yet they were interested in reviewing their operational readiness to manage an incident or crises that could affect their operations and potential impacts on the Georgia World Congress Center campus wide operations. The Georgia Dome is operated by the Georgia World Congress Center Authority which is also responsible for the Georgia World Congress Center (GWCC) and Centennial Olympic Park. The combined facilities are one of the largest sports, entertainment, convention and trade show venues in the world.

The Challenge
The Georgia Dome is well prepared from a ‘tactical’ point of view to handle any incident or crisis they may face. They have well planned joint arrangements in place with public authorities and external stakeholders to ensure successful ‘tactical level’ resolution of incident or crises. The challenge was to ensure they had equally robust ‘strategic’ plans in place to ensure they could manage the problems and issues arising from an occurrence over a prolonged period likely to adversely impact their people, property or reputation. In essence Georgia Dome Management wanted to know, “how prepared are we to handle a complex occurrence that could disrupt operations for a prolonged period affecting our ability to service our clients and potentially taint our solid reputation”?

Inocon Solution
The Inocon Group was engaged to develop and deliver a scenario based simulation activity predominately designed for participants to understand the decisions they could be faced with should a prolonged incident affect their operations. The ReadySim™ activity developed by Inocon for the Georgia Dome Staff used pre-defined objectives, agreed in advance with the Georgia Dome, to exercise their senior management team in the assessment, management and recovery from numerous minor and major scenarios that could realistically take place on any event day. Inocon focused on the strategic decision making processes needed to manage a potential incident / crises while having to maintain venue operations and internal and external communications on an NFL game day.

Results
Inocon’s ReadySim™ solution has contributed significantly to improving awareness of the strategic processes needed to manage incidents or crises that may be out of your control. Inocon’s simulation showed the Dome’s management team that they need to further develop plans on how they would communicate in a crisis situation. The simulation provided the opportunity to learn in a real-time yet realistic and safe atmosphere that has proven to be an excellent training opportunity. This contributes significantly to the protection of not only the Georgia Dome’s expansive tangible assets, but also the intangible assets of both the Georgia Dome and their clients’ reputation and image.