CAPEX project controls

Role

Capital projects on a mine succeed or fail on coordination. The role covered project controls for the capital expenditure program at Harmony’s Hidden Valley gold mine in Papua New Guinea, with projects in every department, working alongside the project managers and heads of department who delivered them.

Responsibilities

• Worked with project managers to budget each project and prepare the applications that got it funded and approved.
• Built project timelines in Microsoft Project, and cash flows tied to key milestones.
• Tracked actual spend, accruals and forecast cost, along with other project health measures.
• Reported health and progress to the executive team at project, department and whole-of-mine level.
• Met project and department managers weekly to review changes and keep every project current.
• Supported document management and the change-of-scope requests raised as projects changed.
• Ran the daily project coordination meeting, where risks were raised and resolved before they reached the schedule.
• Applied Lean Six Sigma tools to simplify documentation and process workflows.

Outcome

The role built a working knowledge of the full project lifecycle and of project planning. It also meant acting as the link between every level of the business: from the workers and project managers, through supervisors and department managers, to the executive team and corporate staff.

For design work, it shows how a design becomes a project: funding, procurement lead times, commissioning, handover documentation and budgets. A product engineer who understands what happens after the drawing is signed off designs things that are easier to build, install and maintain.