DEDICO delivered Croke Park's first stadium-wide business continuity plan, built to ISO 22301 across match days, concerts, conferences, and the GAA Museum.
At a glance
- Client: Croke Park, Dublin
- Service: Business continuity
- Scope: Stadium-wide, covering match days, concerts, conferences, and the GAA Museum
- Standard: ISO 22301
- Status: Delivered
The brief
Croke Park is one of the largest stadium operations in Europe. On a match day, the venue handles over eighty thousand spectators, the broadcast operation that goes with a televised game, the food and hospitality operation across multiple stands and corporate areas, and the GAA's own match-day functions. The same physical site hosts major concerts in the summer, conferences and corporate events in the conference centre, and the GAA Museum as a daily visitor attraction. Each of those operations brings its own continuity risks, and until the engagement began the stadium did not have a single, coordinated business continuity plan covering all of them.
DEDICO was engaged to design and deliver that plan, built to ISO 22301, and to test it with the senior team before it went into operational use.
The approach
The work ran in four phases over approximately :
- Discovery. Structured interviews with operations, IT, security, communications, hospitality, the GAA Museum, and senior leadership. Document review of existing emergency procedures, supplier contracts, and event-specific operating documents.
- Business impact analysis. Identification of the critical functions across the venue's full event mix, with recovery time and recovery point objectives for each.
- Risk assessment. Scenario-by-scenario analysis covering the most relevant risks to a stadium operation, including power failure, crowd safety, weather, cyber incident, supplier failure, and key-person absence.
- Plan development and tabletop exercise. The written plan was developed iteratively against the impact analysis and risk assessment, and was tested in a tabletop exercise with the senior operational team before going live.
What was delivered
- A written business continuity plan covering the full stadium operation, aligned to ISO 22301.
- Scenario-specific response procedures for each of the venue's event types.
- An internal communications plan covering staff, the GAA, partner organisations, and (where relevant) the public.
- A tabletop exercise report with findings and a short list of follow-up actions.
The outcome
The plan is now part of Croke Park's standing operational documentation and is reviewed and updated on a regular cycle.
Considering similar work?
If you operate a venue, a public building, or a complex multi-function site and you've been asked for a continuity plan, or you know you need one, the right move is a 20-minute call to scope what's actually required.