Case Study
According to the background information, the WEG is identified as a huge and extremely complicated world scope event like the Olympics. Furthermore, in 2010, this competition first time left Europe and took place in the USA. Thus, there must be a plenty of risks were ready to dig up.

1. Please identify the scheduling areas for risk among the event participants and their horses.
The first main risk that exist between participants and their horses should be environmental risk, because this is the first time for the riders and their horses to move to a new place. The new place means different climate, humidity, culture, time zone and diet. These differences impact on riders and their horses very much.
According to research, finding is Boophilus annulatus (cattle fever tick) used to infected cattle and triggered some diseases in Texas. “Bovine babesiosis, or piroplasmosis, and the Boophilus ticks were officially eradicated from the continental United States in 1943, except for a permanent quarantine zone that was established in1983 along the Rio Grande River in south Texas. Although the southern cattle tick feeds mainly on cattle, it is often found on horses.” Therefore, for the horses, diseases and parasites is the dangerous risk. The point is that these pure blood horses are expensive property for the riders and other stakeholders. Hence, if this risk occur and out of controlling, the competition would be a catastrophe which full of plague and money loss.
For the participants, the environmental risks are also affect them. Take a simple example, jet lag might be a nightmare for both participants and horses. However, it could be fixed before the competition which is a good news. Nevertheless, during the competition, technical and performance risk (like the horse is frightened) might occur. Environmental factor is one of reason triggering technical risk, additionally, some uncertain elements also cause technical risk.
Accordingly, preventing environmental risks should be focused in the whole progress of this event, meanwhile, basing on the riders experience to keep the horses under control during competition and try to reduce technical risks.

2. Please identify the scheduling areas of risk among the volunteers assisting with this event.

Schedule risk is easily happened between volunteers assisting with this event. From the background information, I realized that the numbers of volunteers is tremendous. A huge number of people means a huge numbers of troubles. Therefore, unqualified personnel risk should be stressed. “Everyone will reach to the incompetent level.” This just is a time question that I read from The Peter Principal. However, different people have different incompetent time. In term of this, how to pick right people to management volunteers and give them orders would be a tough thing. If the unqualified personnel risk happened, the consequence is also sever. According to text book, “missing dates” is a concern, because “The larger and more complex the project is, the higher likelihood you have of missing some dates”. Hence, communication is listed as a key solution again because your missing might not represent other people too. The background information shows 6000 volunteers with scheduled shifts during the event, therefore, there might be some process risk happened, because the volunteering work impose on organization and customers both side. We could not guarantee no risk happened besides 4500volunteers scheduled interviews or training sessions. Overall, risks between the volunteers assisting with this event is more likely trend to some schedule risk and process risk.

3. Where do you think the biggest challenge existed for risk based on scheduling for event participants and volunteers?

For both