Assessment Recovery Plan Early Morning Shock Early this morning over coffee, your emerging consciousness is assailed by a call from the Deputy Chief Project Officer summoning you to an immediate meeting with the Chief Project Officer in the CEOs office. The Deputy Chief Project Officers phone call was very short and somewhat cryptic. It was clear, however, from his voice that a dire situation is emerging. You pressed the Chief Project Officer for more information, but he refused to offer any and then cut the phone call short. The New Flash When you arrive at the meeting, you are guided very quickly into the CEOs inner sanctum where you find the Chief Project Officer and the Deputy Chief Project Officer watching a replay of an earlier News Flash the content is horrifying. A video copy of the News Flash is attached under Assessment/Assessment Item 3. CEOs Meeting Moments later a very harried CEO returns accompanied by the CFO. He has spend the last hour in a video conference with the Board of Directors as they discuss the emerging situation. The CEO welcomes you but quickly hands over to the CFO who hands out a copy of a brief that was prepared earlier that morning. She asks you to read it carefully. It not only confirms the content of the News Flash but reveals even more bad news. A copy of brief is also attached under Assessment/Assessment Item 3. The CFO briefly hand back to the CEO, who explains that Board of Directors will be announcing later this morning that the Chairperson and the CEO have resigned and that the CFO will be temporarily taking over as CEO. At this point the CEO leaves the office. The CFO reports that all directors were present at the Board meeting except for one director who chairs the companys Audit and Risk Committee. That directors whereabouts are presently unknown. The CFO comments no further but the implication is very clear. The interim Chairperson and the interim CEO are schedule to make a public statement later in the morning. But before they do, they want you to draft in broad terms a programme recovery and critical communication plan which if approved will guide the companys response over the following days. Task Your task is to prepare a programme recovery and critical communication plan based on the current information available. In broad terms, the plan should: analyse the overall situation, identify and analyse possible response options, recommend specific courses of action, complete with justification of your proposal, and identify associated roles and responsibilities. Individual Assignment This is an individual assignment. Format The plan must be submitted as report not exceeding 1,500 2,000 words. Anything longer will not be digestable by the Board or the interim CEO. Assessment Assessment Item 3 contributes 30% to the overall mark. Brief Prepared for the Board and CEO Background The Nickelodeon initiative is approaching completion. There have been a few challenges along the way, but generally, the initiative has proceeded on-time and on-budget in fact, it is now expected to come in under-budget and ahead of schedule. The CEO and Chief Project Officer have over the last week completed joint inspections of the mine site, port facilities in both Kumahatata and Tejas, and the smelting plant. They were very impressed with what they observed and have congratulated the various programme teams on their outstanding success. However, this is not to say that there havent been challenges. The expected volume of the tailings-dam near the mine site had been substantially underestimated. The dam design volume had to be expanded three-fold as estimates of the toxic waste products from the processing plant were revised upwards, based upon experimental simulation evidence of the new process being employed. The cultural heritage study conducted in conjunction with the elders from the local community had been vitiated by the aggressive, and sometimes abusive, nature of the supposed expert who conducted the study. In retrospect, the company should have consulted the community before appointing the expert. As a result, the expert was belatedly replaced by another authority who had the support of both the company and the local community. While the new authority had managed to placate the local community, the extent of the cultural heritage study had to be truncated, but the findings to that time had been broadly agreed with the local community. One of the early risks identified in the initiative was the potentially protracted timescale for regulatory and permitting approvals. The relatively young democratic government had little experience in mining ventures and had to hastily establish government groups which could oversee the mining, environmental and cultural heritage approvals. The quality of those approvals, however, could not be guaranteed. Nevertheless, from the companys perspective, all regulatory approvals and permits were actioned very quickly by the government, allowing the initiative to more than recover any time delays caused by these and other challenges. From the outset, the Nickelodeon initiative was a political triumph in Kumahatata due largely to the large-scale employment of locals being offered, and the flow-on opportunities for emerging businesses. Certainly, the government had at least initially strengthened its popular support by taking credit for the Nickelodeon initiative, and enthusiastically (but often somewhat exaggeratedly) espousing the national benefits. However, in more recent times, the political opposition parties had been questioning the share of profits which the country would eventually receive from the Nickelodeon initiative. The political opposition had also questioned the haste, comprehensiveness, and integrity of the regulatory and permitting approvals granted by the government. Current and Emerging Situation Kumahatata News Flashes: Today, in Indonesian West Irian, a tailings dam constructed by the Super Mining Co. has collapsed sending thousands of tons of toxic waste down into three villages below. Recovery teams are now on the scene. Unfortunately, there appear to be few survivors from two villages, which have largely been washed away in the deluge, or buried beneath meters of mud. A third village has been flattened, but being a little further away, the residents have had a few minutes warning of the impending disaster and were able to flee to higher ground. Despite this, their farm plots from which they derive their livelihood have been destroyed. The disaster bears a striking resemblance to the 2015 failure of the Samarcos Fundo Dam in Brazil. Samarco was a joint venture between BHP Billiton and Vale . The Nickelodeon Mining Company which is building one of the worlds largest nickel mines and processing complexes in Northern Kumahatata has been asked to comment on the designs of its own tailing dams. No response has yet been received from the company. In Kumahatata, the political opposition has raised charges that bribes were paid by senior officials in the Nickelodeon Mining Company to executives within the Ministry for Mines, and possibly also within the Ministry for Environment, to expedite regulatory approvals for critical components of the Nickelodeon nickel mine, which is currently nearing completion. The government has dismissed such claims as baseless political claptrap and is refusing calls to hold an inquiry. Other Events A few days ago, the final stretches of the rail link from the mine site had to be suspended when excavations uncovered several buried skeletons and sacred tribal objects. The results of further analysis received today appear to suggest that a large stretch of the rail line runs through an otherwise unknown burial ground of a local tribe. The spiritual beliefs of that tribe regard the disturbance of ancestral skeletons and sacred objects as not only sacrilegious, but they also foretell of environmental catastrophes. In retrospect, the burial site should have been suspected as this particular tribes burial sites follow a known geometric pattern over time. However, the haste of the cultural heritage study apparently overlooked this fact. Even if government approval to proceed with the rail link extension were obtained, further work on the rail link would likely cause violent opposition from the local community. The alternative to avoid significant disruption and prolonged hold-up of the work is to re-route the railway on a 50-kilometre detour through unsurveyed rough country. This would delay the initiative by at least 12 months In response to the media invitation to comment on the integrity of the tailings dam design, the company sought an independent option from US and Australian consulting engineers. Their report is quite damning (forgive the pun!). The dam design lacks the necessary reinforcement for the three-fold increase in volume. The recommended improvements are not simple and will require the demolition of much of the dam. The report makes it very clear that if the dam had reached the stage of being filled, it would have certainly created a catstrophe similar to the Samarco disaster. In regard to the accusations of bribery and corruption, the companys auditors have just briefed the Board of Directors that they have found clear evidence of corrupt payments by one director and three senior managers within the Nickelodeon Mining Company. Ironically, that director chairs the companys Audit and Risk Committee and was not present at the Boards meeting. There is some initial debate around the Board table whether information about the events above should be kept secret from the public and the shareholders. The Board is divided on this. – BENEFITS REALISATION Background The CEO is very pleased with your progress thus far, and she has briefed the Board of Directors accordingly. The Board, not unexpectedly, is also interested in understanding how the proposed programme management implementation will address key deficiencies noted in the independent assessment described in the Question 1 background. As a first topic for discussion at the Board, the CEO has asked you to address benefits realisation. Task Briefly compare and contrast the benefits realisation approaches outlined in at least two major sources, . PMIs Standard for Programme Management and Managing Successful Programmes. What key features, giving examples and reasons, should the companys new benefits realisation process exhibit? Major problems often cited in benefits realisation failures include: * Inflated benefits described in the original business case * Vaguely defined benefits, . . the organisational changes will improve employee, or customer satisfaction . * Operations (business as usual) refuses to accept responsibility, because they have not been involved in the earlier deliberations around the changes proposed and they lack the means to fully realise the benefits because of shortcomings in the delivered product, service or capability, and the supporting infrastructure. What other problems do the academic and practitioner literature (as well as your own experience) suggest can impede benefits realisation? How do you propose to circumvent these problems?
