Mining Project Lessons Learned
This is a practical guide to building a lessons learned for a mining project project — what went well and badly, captured to improve future projects, adapted to the realities of developing a mine or mineral extraction operation.
What a Lessons Learned is
A lessons learned is what went well and badly, captured to improve future projects. For the full concept and how it works in general, see Lessons Learned. On a mining project project it plays the same role, tuned to this kind of work.
Why it matters for a Mining Project project
Mining Project projects live or die on developing a mine or mineral extraction operation. A well-built lessons learned gives the team a shared, explicit reference for exactly that — reducing ambiguity, aligning stakeholders, and making problems visible early enough to act. Skipping it, or doing it generically, is how mining project projects drift into avoidable delay and cost.
What to include
- What happened
- Impact
- Root cause
- Recommendation
Mining Project-specific considerations
Tailor the lessons learned to the risks that most often derail mining project projects:
- Environmental and community risk
- Geological uncertainty
- Remote-site logistics
Example
On a real mining project project, the lessons learned would be shaped by developing a mine or mineral extraction operation. In particular, it should explicitly account for the project’s biggest risks — environmental and community risk, geological uncertainty, remote-site logistics — rather than treating them as afterthoughts.