My previous article was the first in a series of articles on Crime #11 – Inadequate Mine Planners. In this article, let’s delve further into why we might have inadequate planners. Fundamentally there are three reasons why this might be the case: 

 1.      They are incompetent.

2.      They are inexperienced.

3.      Or they are inadequately trained and mentored.

 This article will cover the first cause in that list, which is they are incompetent.  And to be honest, the term incompetent is a bit harsh, it just happened to provide a nice alliteration with the other two causes, making it easier to remember. What I really mean is that mine planning is not the area that they are “gifted in”.

Now I used to run my own mining consultancy called Echelon Mining during a period of a shortage of mining engineers in Australia.  In considering people alternatives, I pursued the option of taking people who were from the mining industry, but weren’t mining engineers and trying to convert them into mining engineers.  I believe I tried this with about ten people over a five-year period.  But, when I look back, I don’t recall one single success of taking someone who wasn’t a mining engineer and turning them into one.

And I think that it fundamentally comes back to the way our brains work, the way we are wired as such.  I remember, for example, trying to teach people how to design pits in 3D using mining software.  This task required some visualization capability of what the intersection of two (odd-shaped) solids would look like. This is one of those areas where you can see it, or you can’t, and if you can’t, it’s very difficult to actually know whether the projection or intersection is right when it’s done.  If this is the area of your talent, then you already have some expectations of what it’s going to look like.

It takes me back to when I did programming (coding) in high school and at university and how this was just a matter of breaking the task down into logical steps and sequences that the program had to perform.  I remember trying to teach coding to people who weren’t analytical, I would describe them as “not having a computer brain”.  It was funny because to me it seemed like they were always thinking too far ahead, they couldn’t slow their brain down enough to think just one simple step at a time.  Instead, they kept trying to perform three or four steps in the one go.

This issue of incompetence is likely to be the least common of the three causes described above, as people who have chosen to study mining engineering are usually analytical and their brain works in the right manner for mine planning. But I have come across people in the industry who were in scheduling roles, that shouldn’t have been.

What should you do with someone who wasn’t made to perform in the scheduling role? Move them into another role. If a person doesn’t have what I call a computer brain and is an analytical and logical type, they’re not likely to make a good scheduling engineer.  If they’re “incompetent” you can generally tell that very quickly and the best thing to do is to make an early call and save everyone the wasted time and effort in trying to make a scheduling engineer out of them.  Because you might get them to the point that they’re okay at their job and that they understand scheduling most of the time.  But, you’ll never turn them into the scheduling engineer who is at the level they need to be for the benefit of your site.  To settle for someone in the scheduling role who is not up to the job is actually undervaluing the role of the scheduling engineer and their importance at your site.

It took me about fifteen years in business to learn the following, if I have to think about whether someone is the right person in a role, I know the answer already. When they are the right person, that thought never enters your mind.