Angelica Mastrodomenico
Organising Sport Department in the Italian Paralympic Committee
In order to achieve its ambitious and overriding objective of “Prepare Athletes to represent Italy at the Paralympic Games and achieve excellent results inside and outside the filed of play”, the Italian Paralympic Committee needs to upgrade its structure.
It has been recognised worldwide the massively changed nature of parasport over the last decade which involved the level of competition and professionalism. Thus a more professional approach in the Athletes and Teams preparation is required to maintain its competitiveness.
The historical and social-economic environment where the Italian Paralympic Committee nowadays acts is very positive. It is a Sport Organisation recently recognised by the Italian Government as a Public Body and it benefits of the appreciation of general public and media. Its budget grew of 40% from the previous one and this allow the Committee to have a solid financial base and to plan its activities on a middle term period.
Even if the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games represented a great success for the Italian Team, the study starts providing an overview of the points of weakness of the Italian Team compared with its direct competitors, those NPCs ranked closed to Italy and with similar sport and cultural back-grounds. The analysis also take into consideration some areas, parasport specific such as “classifications” or “research on prosthesis”, where improvement are needed in order to transform those threats as opportunities.
The purpose of this study is to suggest some structural changes in CIP Sport Department in order to ensure that its Athlete and Staff are best prepared at the Paralympic Games.
Managing Strategically in the Italian Paralympic Committee
The Italian Paralympic Committee is a Confederation of National Paralympic Sport Federation pursuing the task of leading, coordinating and overseeing the organisation of sport activities for people with disabilities on the Italian territory. It has been recently recognised by the Italian Government as a Public Body.
This achievement is going to drive some significant changes to its Organisation such as enhancing the authority in relation to the external environment, increasing the responsibility toward Government and the internal stakeholders, stabilizing public funding and so on.
Furthermore, the growth of the Paralympic movement world wide especially related to the Paralympic Games together with the great results achieved by Italian Paralympic Athletes at the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games captured the attention of politicians, media, public and corporate in Italy with a great impact on its potential development.
The new positioning of CIP in the national sport system and the political and social environment are leading the Italian Paralympic Committee into a new “era”. Many challenges have to be faced in the next future but in order to transform those challenges into opportunities it needs to elevate its structure and management on a strategic dimension.
In particular, this work aims to demonstrate the reasons why CIP needs to develop a “Strategic Plan” starting from a clear identification of the Organisation’s vision and mission and giving suggestions about those.
Then the work briefly analyses the following steps of the Strategic planning process:
- preparing;
- diagnosis of the environment;
- strategic objectives;
- action plan related to the following objective: “Prepare Athletes to represent Italy at the Paralympic Games and achieve excellent results in and out of the field of play”;
- evaluation in relation to this strategic objective.
