Last Friday saw the release of tickets for the “Progress” tour by Take That. In every previous release of tickets for every previous major event, be it sporting or music, the ticket websites and phone lines have failed to cope with the Demand.
Last Friday was no different.
I tweeted (@jamescollings) at 7:40am that morning that the websites would fail to cope with the demand… and 80 minutes later every ticket sales site crashed. Am I blessed with amazing foresight? No. It was, sadly, all too predictable and demonstrates that companies really must embrace a full Capacity Management regime if they want to deliver acceptable levels of service to their customers.
The crashing of websites and phone lines has created a huge media storm. All this publicity is good for Take That… after all, it shows how in demand they are. However the ticket sellers may not come out of this so well. They now have a reputation with the public for being unable to supply a quality service. Sadly, they are all as bad as each other since none of them managed to handle the demand.
Is there anything else that could have been done?
Capacity Management in its most simple form is the provision of the right amount of capacity at the right time. Not too much, and not too little. However, if all demand is co-ordinated to occur at exactly the same moment, then a choice has to be made. Does the service provider supply enough capacity to cope with that initial rush (and then as little as half an hour later find they have 10x the capacity they need), or do they try and spread the demand over a longer period of time.
Demand Management is a discipline closely linked to Capacity Management. In many organisations the Demand Management team are responsible for liaising with the business to identify the future demands that will be placed upon the IT services. What is often missing is the flow of information in the opposite direction. What if the IT services could never reasonably cope with the business demand? This is the case for ticket sales for major events.
It is worth noting that sales for tour dates in Ireland went on sale 1 hour before the sales for UK dates. Why didn’t the Demand Management functions within the ticket sales companies work together to suggest to the Take That management team that spreading the release of tickets on a per venue basis might actually improve the ticket-buying process?
By staggering the demand over a longer period, they could have reduced the incoming load down to a level that could be supported by the systems. True, it would not have resulted in the blanket press coverage that ensued over the following 2 days. However it would also have prevented the debacle becoming the hot topic across social networking sites.