Raffaella Valeri
MANAGING HUMAN RESOURCES IN THE ITALIAN PARALYMPIC COMMITTEE
The Italian Paralympic Committee (CIP) was established on 2003 from the former Italian Sports Federation for people with disabilities (FISD).
It has changed substantially its role from a National Federation, already recognised by the Italian Olympic Committee, into a Confederation of National Paralympic Federations (NFs) under the supervision of Presidency of the Ministers Council and of the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) for high level sport only.
On august 2015, by the Law n. 124/2015, the Italian Paralympic Committee has been recognised by the Italian Government as a Public Body with role and features similar to the Italian Olympic Committee but only for Paralympic sports and fully independent from it.
Since February 17 TH 2017, with the publication of the implementing decree of this law the reform has become effective.
Now the challenge consists in designing a new strategy and internal organization to meet the overarching goal of developing sport activity among disabled people, both as a means to recover from serious illness or accidents or for leisure, up the competition ladder that takes to top ranking international Olympic champions
The present study deals with one of the most challenging aspects of such “change management process”, i.e. the managing of human resources.
As a matter of fact, CIP’s staff has been growing over the years along with the Federation’s development and change, and now is facing once again the major task of changing itself into public employee, after a long experience in an Organization responding to private laws and regulations.
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.
