Play along with me. Imagine you have just completed a BI project on site, where people bought in because they understood what it was about, why you wanted to do it and believed in it. Throughout the project, you played a key role in the sponsorship and communication of this initiative. The right team had been selected and freed up from their daily tasks to allow them to fully commit. The benefits tracking has been confirming what you had heard on the grapevine: it’s going well and people can see the positive changes.
Envisage this…
At your HQ:
- Month on month, quarter on quarter, safety and production targets are met; in fact, there’s talk that they will have to revise the forecast upward. TRIFR is trending in the right direction and the employee engagement numbers are steadily improving since you’ve started to track the indicator, you can notice this in your dealings with people.
- When you talk to your COO or GM, there is a different feel to the conversation—more confidence, and less paranoia.
- You now have a set of leading and lagging indicators on your strategic dashboards. Progress is being made towards implementing major parts of the strategy. Costs per unit are coming down, allowing the team to review the cutoff grades, in turn opening up the possibilities of increasing your resource and reserves; and yet, Mother Nature has not changed anything in the ground.
- The dashboards give you an idea of what levers need to be pushed or pulled to respond as conditions change.
- As the site is maturing, resilience increases and the factors that had limited the asset’s scalability have been removed.
You want to see this in action for yourself so you pay the site a visit:
- Daily or Weekly Production Meeting (aka ‘Morning Prayers’)
- This is now understood to be one of the most important pulse checks on site. It has all the right players present, who are on time and fully prepared to talk to their numbers. Not only that, they already have initiated actions, where shortfalls or some unexpected events have occurred (it is mining after all, not a factory).
- Speaking of actions, there now is a proper action log, participants have accessed it before the meeting and updated any actions they had a role to play in, as it’s online thus easily available and always up to date. Engineers are not poets, but the actions that are captured now at least are articulated in such a manner that the incoming shift can also understand them. Gone are the days of unloved, smeary whiteboards on the wall with line items such as ‘Pump’ or ‘Shift change’.
- The team reviews the report; these days it’s up-to-date, trusted and owned. As the last 24 hours or 7 days are reviewed by area, the meeting facilitator manages the agenda efficiently by managing by exception. If we’ve met expectations we move on. If there are issues we spend a bit of time diving deep enough to understand them.
- You can feel that there is sufficient ‘psychological safety’ for them to speak up, although they may not know what that’s called…
- Before the meeting ends, there is a brief roundtable discussion. It’s more about getting everyone’s commitment than an opportunity to whinge. The facilitator explicitly addresses each one by name (ok, so perhaps it’s their nickname), and asks them if anything was stopping them from getting their stuff done today.
- The meeting wraps up and the participants leave, being clear on who does what between now and the next meeting.
- Planning
- Annual, quarterly, weekly and daily planning now follows a proper, documented process, people have been trained and production rates are treated with respect. Everyone who plays a role in the execution of the plan is involved in the making of it.
- Execution
- Shifts have clear targets, which are not just the monthly target divided by the number of shifts. These used to set them up for failure, because they already knew at shift start that they were down on crew numbers or equipment that was booked in for service, making the average target unobtainable. Average targets equals average results.
- The supervisors understand that their role is to make sure their teams have everything they need and proactively follow up with everyone as the shift unfolds.
- Reports
- Nowadays, everyone trusts the data and the reports. There are specific owners of these and if there are issues, they get quizzed. The KPIs now include leading ones as well as lagging ones. The lead indicators give the teams a heads-up of what’s coming, and what’s about to go off the rails well before they do. One of the issues this site used to suffer from was that the plans were always delivered last minute, hand-to-mouth. This always put production on the back foot. Now, the team monitors the size of the backlog of stope or blast designs, carefully watching if the trend goes in the wrong direction so they can do something about it well before impacting production.
- Later in the day, you spend some time with the site’s GM. Their day-to-day activities have changed significantly. In the past, the day seemed to consist of going from one crisis meeting to the next. By contrast, every month the GM now meets with each HOD. Like you, they too have a dashboard they review together. It contains leading and lagging indicators, plus a bunch of tactical and project actions clearly defined as deliverables and aligned with the strategic and tactical plans. They adjust their priorities monthly – not daily or hourly. This allows the department’s team members to focus on fewer things and actually get them done.
- Another thing you notice is that there is a much calmer feel to the place, more control and less pandemonium. Gone are the days when the GM would ‘break rank’ and get superintendents and engineers to do their bidding directly. There is a clear chain of command. The GM works with the HODs, using the aforementioned dashboards. The HODs work with their superintendents and engineers and this order follows down to the supervisors and operators.
Having paid attention to all of the pain points in the cause and effect chain and addressed them one by one you and your team are increasingly looking like rockstars!
