Course description
Over the last decade, there have been increasing demands for local communities to have direct involvement in decision-making, in co-development initiatives, and overall for improved environmental performance throughout the life of mining developments. As a result, pressure from external stakeholders is changing the space of environmental assessment and engagement processes, regulatory requirements, and management standards.
In fact, mining proponents have been failing to gain approvals, or experiencing extended permitting delays and significant rework due to dis-satisfied external stakeholders. When compared to baseline projections of budget and schedule, the result has meant high project failure rates – on the order of 70% within this sector.
To avoid such failures, industry must:
- Improve the transparency of proposed plans and implement specific engagement strategies to identify risks and concerns of both internal and external stakeholders.
- Introduce system-based opportunity evaluations, itegrated risk avoidance measures, and life-cycle perspectives to reduce potential social and environmental impacts overall.
Unfortunately, standard project management programs tend only to refer to these processes at a high level. To become effective in streamlining to gain environmental approvals, both in-sector knowledge, and more in-depth discussion and training are necessary.
This workshop offers a front-end planning framework and processes to improve communications between multi-discipline stakeholders, to increase the visibility of complex systems, and to facilitate collaboration, by breaking down silos. The process allows for expanded dialogue around various project aspects, helping to reduce potential impacts of project processes and deliverables on the environment, the local economy, and the corporate bottom line.
Course content
This workshop offers registrants an opportunity to learn about iterative and collaborative conceptual design, integrated project planning, and lean project management strategies. Students will be introduced to proactive, streamlined approaches to maximizing value while ensuring minimal social and environmental impacts of future developments.
The course will be taught in person, in a group setting over the course of two days, with a large proportion of time dedicated to applied and interactive exercises. Hands-on learning is the best strategy for everyone to fully comprehend lessons, as well as to be able to repeat the processes on their own projects, and as such more than half of the class duration will involve active, applied work within the class.
Problem relevancy and solution guidance will be conveyed somewhat lecture style, with opportunities for dialogue during these short segments. Lecture periods will be interspersed with instructor-led, independent work, 1-1 and group discussions, and interactive, inclusive exercises.
Exercises will include:
- Short exercises to help engage the class at the start, and encourage recognition of differing perspectives, knowledge and experiences
- Staged and directed brainstorming around project components, risks and requirements, utilizing checklists and examples, to help identify scope of a project, as well as increase recognition of knowledge & experience of a “team”
- Affinity mapping of project components and identifying interrelated functions, to understand complexity of the system
- Value stream mapping of the project development/evaluation milestones and the relations between multiple teams, to highlight how many stakeholders are typically involved throughout the lifecycle of a project
- Optimization exercise to practice how we might prioritize work and discover alternative solutions for better environmental performance and social acceptance
- Small group exercises to analyse example project components, to help participants understand how to identify the necessary information required for design, as well as which stakeholders to engage, to identify appropriate options to assess for said component
Type of training
This course combines classroom lectures and group work.
Objectives and outcome
After taking this course, participants will:
- Understand and be able to identify project requirement types, as well as the risks associated with long-term and integrated project development lifecycles
- Understand how to discover systems-based risks and improvement opportunities
- Have the means to identify relevant project stakeholders, including those who might introduce less obvious requirements of their own
- Have a basis for better communication to create and/or improve alignment on the actual and entire scope of the project, including the multiple project objectives of all involved stakeholders
- Have a means to collaboratively assess & optimize process flows through value stream mapping and other lean processes
Language
English
