In summary, the participants identified a lack of project delays from social unrest as a significant measure of the success. The spin-off of this was a more content and productive workforce. On the environmental side they pointed to a mitigation of environmental risks which prevented exposure to bad publicity. A measure of these outcomes was improved organisational performance. A personal and organisational outcome for the participants was having a clear conscience of having achieved these outcomes.
PC04: "…with the realization now that this is something that we can not ascribe to the minimum criteria set out in the law, we've got to go beyond, because the expectation is much larger. There's a lot more proactive measures that are coming in from the mining companies to be able to improve on what we've done previously."
A consequence of this is understood to be much earlier and thorough stakeholder engagement from PCs and PMs in particular to establish their social licence to operate.
PM09: "…you have to be involved much more upfront to think about the procurement strategy. How do I arrive from the beginning, study phase, procurement, you have to consider the impact of the environment and social and not leave it [until] after. Project management needs to start focusing on those things"
In summary, this section identified that legislators and funders would have more stringent requirements for the inclusion of sustainability in large-scale mining projects. In order to stay ahead of these pressures project managers will have to ensure that they go beyond compliance in their efforts. This will require from them a more proactive approach to inclusion of sustainability through earlier engagement and definition of strategy.
5.6.2.2 Organisational Shift
PMs have traditionally been comfortable with ensuring environmental sustainability is integrated into their practice, as prescribed by PCs. The social aspects have been left to the PC to deal with. However, a significant trend identified by PMs has been the shift of social responsibility onto them through contractual obligations, by the PCs.
PM05: "…the owners, who realize that the issues are there, are making it the contractor's problem… Even the blue-chip companies. They pass the risk on. They make it very clear what the requirements are but they don't accept any of the issues that go with it. They make it the contractor's problem to properly manage them and make sure they're not late."
Projects will therefore need to have a large emphasis on localisation and social engagement. PM07 indicated that this would have ramifications for equipment design
to ensure its ease of installation by unskilled employees.
PM10 criticised the insufficient reference and indicated that project management literature would need to explicitly include sustainability as part of its doctrine due to its growing importance.
PM10: "…you want to create a pillar just for that within project management.
You don't want to generalize it across the management areas. It's something you must take cognizance of, and you must plan and put it within all the other stuff that's critical within project management."
The implication of this increased focus is that projects would likely need to change their structure to include sustainability specialists as part of the core team that work alongside PMs. The purpose of these specialists would be to steer the social agenda within the project in a more proactive manner.
PM05: "The first thing I think is that we're going to end up changing our structure. So, we typically will have a single project manager, quite technically sorted... If we wanted to be bigger influencers in there as part of the project, which is the way I see it will go, then we will change our structures so that we'll have a technical team and we'll have… a sustainability team, that might look more after special projects for the guys and understanding how they come in."
Also mentioned and worth noting was the potential for more companies to start reframing their organisational mission. This reframing would be to view the projects and the mines as a means to creating social upliftment.
PM09: "So there's mining companies now that say they're not in the business of mining, they in the business of uplifting communities… So if you can focus everything to uplift communities, then you know, to do that I need to build a mine."
In summary of this section, PMs would see a shift in the allocation of social responsibility to their contracts. This would bring with it, emphasis on integration of local stakeholders into the project. Achieving this would likely result in a change in design considerations to allow for project implementation to be achieved by unskilled workers. Projects would also need to bring on social experts as part of the project team to ensure this was managed as a key deliverable for the project. These changes
would need to be supported by changes in organisational strategy around the inclusion of sustainability in project delivery.