In a previous posting on this blog, I listed some attributes of a good consultant. I shared the list with a young engineer who has worked in the trenches of a construction site, in the offices of a prestigious consultant, and who is now working for a large mining company. In their role with the mining company, they retain and manage many consultants. Their comments on this list included the following:
- That is a great list, but it is hard to find many consultants of such ability.
- If you find such skilled consultants, they are inevitably very busy and need to rely on many juniors of lesser skills.
- Any rate, even the best consultant, if not properly managed, does not succeed.
- Select your consultants carefully and then meet with them often, listen to what they advise, and give them detailed direction.
- You must integrate their advice into the bigger picture; for they cannot possibly have the full picture of the entire project and company prospective.
- It is necessary to rapidly read any documents from your consultant and to comment in detail thereon. They are entitled to rely on your application, input, and perspective.
- You must seek to learn from your consultant, and seek to give them opportunities to learn from you.
- If both you and your consultant learn from the project, you may both go forward to the next project and greater productivity and success.
These are smart observations. As a consultant seeking to provide services to a client, you cannot always select your client, but maybe you can exhort them to these ways of managing you.
Every consultant should have the experience of working for the owner at some point and understand the other side’s challenges, ranging from deciphering the consultants invoices to developing clear and fair terms of reference for work. Conversely, the owner’s engineer/scientist really needs to have experienced the pressures of being a consultant, answering many masters, including their own management. Mutual respect, at least to begin with, goes a long way towards a useful relationship that focusses on the real needs of the project!
Its really nice and fruitful post thanks to the author.
Small mining companies often don’t have the experience in-house to manage external consultants doing a study for them, although their management often thinks they do. It makes life easier for the external consultant, as well as for management, if they have an experienced owner’s rep to manage things and provide the necessary linkage between all the interested parties, even if this person must be contracted. One needs to understand issues from both the Owner’s perspective and the consultants perspective to complete studies efficiently.
Dear Sir
How do you apply for a mining consultant and what is the criteria. Having a degree in psychology will the company offer the necessarily skills to qualify. I struggle to get the needed information.
To Don Van Wyk,
I think you have the wrong idea. A mining consultant is someone who knows all there is to know about mining. He is not a therapist or a psych counsellor. All business or professional people who have succeeded at their careers already know very well how to communicate and respect others. Career successes are natural-born psychologists, and understanding others is second nature; they do not need to go to university and study it like a foreign language.
But Fred makes a valid point about sometimes needing a go-between, or better yet a designated scientific/engineering person from the mine owner side to work with the consultant. Small mining outfits are quick and entrepreneurial and a lot of mining consultants are slow and bureaucratic, and hence a lot of mutual frustration and dissatisfaction. Mine owners are sceptical about a mining consultant’s ability to deliver the goods in time not to lose financing and deadlines for shareholders.
Time is money lost on one side, and money gained, on the other, which is the basis for the mine owners’ concerns. The employees of both sides often (but not always) have entirely different modes of operation – one is results and time-driven, and the other is managed as a process-driven hierarchical organization, conscious of legal liabilities, and more complacent about the rest.
Entrepreneurial mine consultants (small outfit) do the best work with smaller mining outfits, and only large mining concerns can see eye-to-eye with the larger mining consultants, usually.
LB
Dear L. Boivin
I understand the work of a mining consultant but in the human resource department of any mine working with people there is a need for a Human Resource Consultant.
My question is that this person needed in house training with the specific company and if he/she have some qualification from a university, will it not be an advance for this person.
I will appreciate it if you could give me info about it.
DB
Mervyn makes a very crucial point. Adding another layer or go-between between the client and the consultant (like a HR person) does not improve communication or transparency or results. It will probably just annoy everybody and hinder communication. I hate to say it, but companies have HR people to deal with staff problems or communications that they do not want to bother with. It is almost the HR person’s job to block direct communication with management, not enable it, even if that was not the original or official intention. There are rare exceptions; they are usually experienced mining or geoscience people who go into HR because they see an additional way to be effective. Mining companies are in business to mine, not train HR people about mining ……… HR people with good attitudes, great people skills, who are interested in mining will make it their business to pick up knowledge from the rest of the team, but they are restricted to dealing with employee benefits and screening processes, not generally getting involved in senior or project communication or planning.
All modern education qualifications in this technological and scientific society should start with a base of technical/scientific know-how in order to be relevant to modern industrial needs. If you did not get this grounding, then yes, you should definitely take continuing education seminars with a university or via the professional associations in the industry of your choice. It will definitely give you credibility and demonstrate you have a good attitude about learning a bit about what you need to know in the sector.
Inexperienced job applicants may have certificates and degrees, but older experienced people often have the credentials to have written all the textbooks and more, with no associated paper trail from a learning institution. HR people usually cannot understand the significance of the acquired cutting-edge technical knowledge of a very experienced person, unless they have a lot of experience themselves in the industry, Schools teach what the industry has already invented and used for awhile. The mining industry developed all of the technology and accumulated all the data currently used to teach students about all the new fields of environmental science, pollution, remediation, etc. etc. etc., and they are continually innovating and improving on these technologies.
Absolute transparency of project/operation and immediate and open communication between Client/Sponsor/PM and Consultant is vital to any relationship’s success or failure.