Week 1, Day 1, and the underground weekly mine plan has already been thrown out of the window. Again.
Sick calls, breakdowns, overruns, overlooked interactions, longer re-entries. Whether you call it a weekly plan or a 7/21, you can relate. It is rarely a discipline problem; more often it is an interactions problem. The better question is whether the team still got value from the plan.
The plan still did its job
A plan’s job is to share the right information with the right people, at the right time for them to use it. Even on a week that falls apart, technical services know where the drills are going and which plans to generate, shift supervisors know how many tonnes are left in the priority stope and where to bog next, and the paste and blast crews are inspecting and preparing the next work locations to stay ahead.
Information, not prediction.
A plan is not a schedule
The monthly or quarterly schedule (the 3MS) tells you what gets mined and roughly when. The weekly plan breaks that down into something supervisors and mine foremen can actually run a shift on. Scheduling sets the sequence; planning does the translating.
The production engineer is the conduit
It is the production or scheduling engineer’s role to chase down the mining foreman, the survey data, the geology model, and the production and fill rates. That is the job. They are the single most important part of the process, and often they are the least experienced person on site. Garbage in, garbage out.
Detail is the job
A schedule can say “Heading C, week of the 8th.” A plan has to say who is driving what, on which shift, in what order, what is ready and what is not. Strip that out and it is just a schedule wearing a plan’s name.
Written for the supervisor
All that detail has one audience: the person running the shift. If the supervisor cannot pick it up and know exactly what they are doing, in what order and with what resources, the plan has already failed — no matter how complete it looks on a screen.
Borrow their eyes
A successful weekly plan should not be judged on compliance to plan alone. It should be judged on the quality of information it gives the operations team.
Who does your weekly plan, and does it add value?
The carousel
This piece began as a LinkedIn carousel. The full deck is below — use the arrows, or click any slide to enlarge.
