Calgary’s Event Centre project lacks documented reporting on risks and quality management along with a handover plan when completed, according to a City of Calgary auditor’s report.

However, the $1.25 billion stadium’s project manager said that this work is being done on a regular basis, it’s just not being collected and collated as per Calgary’s Corporate Project Management Framework.

The report on Event Centre governance came back to the city’s audit committee Thursday and provided three observations and recommendations for continued documentation of work on the new arena.  The project officially broke ground earlier this year and the newly-named Scotia Place is expected to be complete by the summer of 2027.

“We concluded that the city has established key governance structures and processes to support the execution and delivery of the Event Center Project,” said senior auditor Chinedu Odunukwe.

“However, further enhancements to risk management and quality management processes are required to best support the city’s oversight of this critical project.”

The report noted no documented risk response for risks reported in the risk register. The report said that it limits the City’s ability to respond to financial risks, schedule concerns, quality of work or reputational matters.

It also recorded no documented plan to monitor the project’s quality, which could lead to inconsistent project delivery, defects and delays, the report read. Finally, the third observation was the lack of a project closure plan, which would outline the handover of the arena to the project owner, including that deliverables agreed to on the project were completed.

Odunukwe said there were risk mitigation updates, but no framework for how the risks were assessed and ranked.

“The overall governance of the risk management process was lacking that, so in as much as there was risk register that reported periodically on how the risks were being mitigated, the structure itself was not well defined to enable a robust reporting process,” he said.

‘Risks were being managed’

James McLaughlin, manager for the Event Centre Project Delivery, said risks were being managed on a “week-to-week, day-to-day basis.”  He said what was missing was the documentation outlining what had been done.

“The missing part is the paperwork, the documentation of how we were doing it,” he told the audit committee members.

“It was actively happening. I believe we were up to 35 or 38 risks at one point that we were actively tracking and managing. But what was missing was the front-end documentation of how we were actually doing that. We didn’t lay it out from an audit perspective, that somebody could walk in and read it.”

McLaughlin acknowledged that they were trying to move the project along as quickly as possible, however, the risk mitigation work was happening. Nothing was overlooked from a risk perspective, he said. They were working quickly to manage risks to prevent any delays.

“From a criteria perspective, anything that causes a delay of more than a day becomes a critical risk that’s managed immediately, because the time-cost of money on this project is very significant and will have a terrible impact on our delivery of scope if we enter any conditions with a significant delay,” he said.

Ward 2 Coun. Jennifer Wyness said she was happy to see the audit catch the lack of a closure plan. She said Calgary taxpayers often come back to the city if a project isn’t delivered as intended.

“How come we weren’t really thinking about handover checklists to make sure the taxpayer is not left holding the bag again?” Wyness asked.

McLaughlin said there’s a closeout framework in place, but it hasn’t been populated. That’s largely because the development manager, CAA Icon, has a methodology for the handover of projects to the owner.

“What we’ll do is we’ll accelerate the development of that under a heading of a closeout plan,” McLaughlin said.

All of the recommendations were agreed to by the Event Centre project delivery team and are to be completed by Jan. 30, 2025.