Civcon Project Stilfontein: 13 - 17 July ‘09

Civcon Project Stilfontein: 13 - 17 July ‘09

This week started slowly, with Dokes unfortunately still ill. Monday was a straight forward day but high paced. We did observations and coaching in the morning and the afternoon. In between we did the data capturing and daily reports. Not much to mention here although it is still insightful to see the process in action. Tuesday morning was also par for the course, with observations and coaching done on an extremely cold day. In the afternoon Patrick came by and looked at some of the things and also showed us a new weekly report presentation in PowerPoint that he wants BBS teams to use. This is basically to communicate at risk behaviours and site conditions to the site management, so that they can see what their most at risk occupations are and then focus their attention on that accordingly. Patrick spent most of the afternoon on this. On Wednesday it was business as usual with more site visits, observations and coaching. Needless to say, the data capturing followed… Apart from the usual suspects, Johan Deysel arrived on site. He is going to succeed Dokes here as the process champion. With Dokes being promoted to project manager, a new process champion had to be assigned and Johan transferred here after he finished a previous project.
Thursday saw Johan having to go to induction, and afterwards Leonard and I took him to site to get to know the lay of the land. At this stage, Dokes has been off site for two weeks and the updated Project Plan is with him. This is a bit of a headache because our work is being done kind of “blindly”. We are continuing with the necessities but certain things are lagging behind as a result. Things are just a little slow at this stage, but it will pick up just as soon as Dokes gets back to hand over to Johan. This will at least see Johan updated and then he can start leading and indicating the direction in which things have to progress.
On Friday, we got started with the planning for the Supervisors PACT agreements and we also worked on the two weekly reports that needed to be compiled. The new report posed some problems on a site as big as the one we are at. Once Johan has spoken to Patrick about it there will probably be some more clarity on what exactly has to be incorporated and what not. The project has now started moving into phase two and some of the structures that are finished already will be duplicated to enlarge the capacity of the processing plant. This can be a problem as the employees may become careless with the work that they have done successfully previously. As a team, the Safety department need to be vigilant with their approach to the work being done in phase two, to ensure the that all employees adhere to the PACT that they have made with their team. But for this week that is it.