Project controlling in mega events : application on Milan Expo 2015

Although Universal Expositions are an incredible catalyst for the development of hosting cities, they have to face projects’ common problems as over-budgets and delays. This last issue is critic as mega events have to respect a mandatory deadline and any delay could cause critical project scope reductions. It is thus fundamental to control efficiently and effectively their progress to obtain best performances. Despite “project controlling” field is well-documented concerning mega-projects, there is a gap for mega events. In addition, literature focuses on strategic elements without providing operative methods to control the execution phase. This work aims to fill this gap highlighting how mega-events can be considered as “mega-programmes”, suggesting supervision through a project envelope to avoid forecasting problems and proposing a gradual control according to project statuses. These results provide a model to monitor Milan Expo 2015 execution phase, guaranteeing that all projects involved end within deadlines. This model has been implemented exploiting the potentiality of Petri nets and the simulation of dynamic systems with Rockwell Arena 13.0 software, in order to improve the efficiency in the creation of progress curves.