Mine closure projects can spend years building the technical foundations for closure. Studies are completed. Designs are developed. Approvals are progressed. Closure criteria are refined. Cost estimates evolve. Risks are assessed.
All of that work is essential.
But there comes a point in the life of a closure project where having more technical information is no longer the main challenge. The challenge becomes bringing it all together and turning it into an executable project.
“Closure projects reach a point where the biggest opportunity is no longer in another individual technical study, it’s in bringing all the workstreams together and understanding how they interact. Through this process we uncovered a significant number of interdependencies, opportunities for collaboration and ways to improve sequencing, reduce duplication and potentially save significant cost. Just as importantly, we mapped the critical points for internal and external stakeholder engagement so those conversations can happen at the right time. This is where closure planning starts to become a genuinely integrated delivery program.”
— Andrew Hutton, Technical Director, IEMA
We recently facilitated a multi-day closure planning workshop for a major mining operation that has reached exactly this stage. The project is transitioning from a collection of individual technical workstreams toward coordinated implementation of the remaining closure works.
In our experience, this is one of the most important transition points in the closure lifecycle.
Closure is inherently multidisciplinary. Environmental specialists, engineers, operations personnel, project managers, rehabilitation practitioners, approvals specialists and site teams can all be progressing important pieces of work. Individually, those pieces may make perfect sense. The risk is that they don’t necessarily make sense as a single implementation program.
A really important part of this workshop was therefore bringing all of the different workstream teams together and having them actively participate in the process.
Rather than closure planning being undertaken by a small central team and then communicated back to the various disciplines, the people responsible for developing, managing and ultimately delivering the individual workstreams were part of the conversation.
That made a significant difference.
Each workstream sees the project from a slightly different perspective and holds different knowledge about constraints, opportunities, timing and delivery. Putting those teams together creates the opportunity to test the interfaces between their work in real time.
And one of the strongest outcomes from the workshop was just how many interdependencies became visible once we started looking at the project collectively.
A decision in one workstream could influence the timing, cost or delivery approach of another. Infrastructure needed to remain operational until other activities were complete. Access, water management, approvals, rehabilitation, demolition, engineering and operational requirements all interacted in different ways.
That reinforced an important point:
Closure cannot be successfully delivered through individual workstreams operating in isolation.
It requires genuine collaboration.
More importantly, identifying those interdependencies wasn’t simply about managing risk.
It also highlighted opportunities.
Once the workstreams could see how their programs interacted, we were able to identify areas where activities could potentially be coordinated differently, where enabling works could unlock other parts of the program, where duplication might be avoided and where sequencing could be improved.
Those conversations have the potential to deliver better closure outcomes while also reducing cost.
That is one of the areas where integrated planning can add significant value. The opportunity is not necessarily about doing less. It is often about doing things in a smarter order, combining activities where appropriate and making decisions with visibility of the whole project rather than one workstream at a time.
Our approach starts before anyone enters the workshop room.
The objective is not to spend valuable workshop time rediscovering information that already exists. Participants should arrive with a common baseline understanding so the discussion can concentrate on the things that actually require collective judgement: testing assumptions, resolving interfaces, identifying gaps, challenging sequencing and making decisions.
Plans, drawings and reports provide one perspective. Standing together in the area being discussed, looking at the physical constraints and talking through how the work might actually be delivered provides another. Combining those perspectives can change the conversation significantly.
Another important part of the process was looking beyond the physical closure works themselves. We also mapped the key milestones for internal and external stakeholder engagement against the emerging closure program.
Closure decisions do not happen in isolation from the people affected by them.
There are points in the program where internal leadership, operational teams, regulators, landowners, community representatives and other stakeholders may need to be informed, consulted or involved in decision-making.
Identifying those milestones early helps ensure engagement is proactive rather than reactive and, importantly, that stakeholder requirements are considered as part of the implementation pathway rather than added later.
Importantly, the goal of this process is not simply to produce another closure document.
The real value is creating alignment around questions such as:
- What actually remains to be done?
- What needs to happen first?
- What is dependent on something else?
- Where can workstreams collaborate?
- What can potentially start earlier?
- Where are the key uncertainties?
- Where are there opportunities to improve outcomes or reduce cost?
- When do key internal and external stakeholders need to be engaged?
- Who owns the next action?
- And what decisions are required to keep the project moving?
Those questions sound simple, but on large and complex closure projects the answers can sit across multiple disciplines, documents, teams and years of project history.
A well-structured planning process creates a point where that knowledge can be consolidated, challenged and converted into a shared implementation pathway.
It also creates something equally important: ownership.
Closure plans are much more likely to move into successful execution when the people responsible for delivering the work have participated in shaping the pathway rather than simply receiving a finished plan.
Bringing all of the workstream teams together also helps create a shared understanding that closure is not owned by one person, one department or one technical discipline. It is a whole-of-project delivery challenge. That is particularly important as a project moves closer to execution.
At this stage, decisions around interfaces, enabling works, sequencing, stakeholder engagement and ownership can have significant implications for schedule, cost, risk and ultimately the ability to achieve the agreed closure outcomes.
Finding an issue during planning creates options. Finding the same issue once contractors are mobilised and physical works have commenced can create cost and delay.
The same applies to opportunities. Identifying collaboration opportunities early can allow projects to optimise sequencing, coordinate work packages, avoid duplication and potentially achieve better outcomes for less expenditure. There is also an opportunity at this stage to challenge the assumption that everything must wait for one large closure campaign.
When the complete program is visible, opportunities can emerge for progressive works, early enabling projects or activities that can be brought forward while other parts of the closure program continue to mature.
Done well, this type of workshop is therefore much more than a workshop.
It is a bridge between closure strategy and closure delivery.
The technical studies remain critical, but eventually a closure project needs to move beyond asking, “What is the technical solution?”
It needs to start asking:
“How are we actually going to deliver this — together?”
That transition is where integration, collaboration, facilitation and practical implementation experience can add enormous value. And for many closure projects, getting that transition right can be just as important as getting the technical studies right in the first place.