Client: World’s largest copper mine

The mine operation had been actively working on transforming their ways of working for some time with the support of a large management consulting team. I was engaged to help them transition from their current reliance on external consultants to be more self-reliant and adopt a culture of continuous improvement.

I was engaged as an Agile Coach, in the Operational Excellence Office, to primarily work with a team scaling a new technology to extract copper from low quality ore and old tailing dumps. Traditionally these sources had been considered waste but after some experimenting it was realized that there were opportunities to extract significant quantities of copper and extend the life of the mine.

From the outside then team looked like they were a SCRUM team: they had a Product Owner, Scrum Master, and they were driving their work in 2 week sprints. The reality was they were running a Kanban board populated with tasks and their focus was on reporting out progress daily at a standup run by the Scrum Master and bi-weekly to stakeholders at sprint review. The focus was on reporting and needed to be on actually getting work done!

Through observation and feedback, I helped the team become self-managing by:

• Guiding the team to break down the big ideas into smaller consumable chunks that could be completed in a two-week iterations
• Helping the Product Owner prioritize using complexity/value techniques
• Working with the Scrum Master to step back and allow the team self-manage
• Explaining the benefits of using a sprint review to gather feedback and collaborate with stakeholders rather than a detailed status report
• Using retrospectives to drive a mindset of continuous improvement