Let me start this article with a fundamental philosophy that can’t be ignored – “you can’t be held accountable for something you don’t control”. I wrote this article for a blog 9 years ago without ever posting it, I found it recently and decided it is time to post it as I still believe it is as true today as it was then.

So how does being held accountable apply to mine plans and achievement of the plan? Well, read on.

It never ceases to amaze me the continual and ongoing battle at most mine sites between Mine Production (MP) and Technical Services (TS) around the mine plan and in particular the quality of the mine plan and the implementation of it. Maybe it is a simplistic view, but to me, TS are accountable for the quality of the mine plan and MP are accountable for implementing the mine plan. So if MP are accountable for implementing the plan, then they should be very interested in the quality of the plan, i.e. the achievability of it.

So in my books, it is as simple as this, MP are the owners of the mine plan. If they are to put it in place, then it is theirs to own and to have some role in the creation of it in the first place. TS are a conduit to produce the plan for MP, they are providing a “service” to MP in producing the plan, which is exactly why their department name is Technical Services!

Why is it as simple as that? Well, it comes back to knowing who to hold accountable (see my first sentence!!). If I’m the General Manager at a mine site that has a culture of following the plan and the mine site is underperforming, then firstly I can measure if MP followed the plan. If they didn’t then there lies the culpability, if they did follow the plan then obviously, it wasn’t a good plan and so the culpability lies with TS for producing a poor plan. What happens at most sites is that TS says “they didn’t follow the plan” and MP says “we didn’t follow it because it was a bad plan”. How does the poor GM know what to fix?

That’s the simple part, but it does raise further questions, for example:

• Who in MP has the time and expertise to ensure the plan they are getting from TS is a good plan and so they’re happy to implement it?
• If you’re going to follow the plan, what do you do about the fact the mine plan is a single snapshot in time and therefore it doesn’t take long before operations are “off-plan”?
• What length of time frame plans does the above plan ownership logic apply? It obviously applies to short-term plans that MP need to implement, but what about 5-year plans or life of mine plans?

They’re all good subjects for future articles………

This article is the twelfth in a series of articles on various issues and topics relating to mine scheduling. If you found this article beneficial, you can always go back to the first article here and read through the series in order.

For other articles like this and quality conversations on a range of mining engineering subjects, I’d encourage you to join the LinkedIn Group called MinErs Digs, click here.