What's your job about?
BHP owns and operates seven coal mines and one port in Queensland. My team, based in Brisbane, is responsible for delivering projects across these operations. Each project is worth up to twenty million dollars (this is just my team – in other parts of our business, BHP also has projects worth well over a billion dollars) and involves some engineering complexity.
A typical project involves buying a new piece of equipment, getting engineers to design all the bits that connect to it, and then all the work to install it and get it going.
Most of the time I work from my home office or the corporate office in Brisbane city, but today I’m with a consultant on-site at one of our open-cut coal mines. We’ve been staying at a mining camp and were up early for breakfast in the mess hall. Today we spent the morning walking around our coal processing plant to learn about the condition of the existing equipment and the challenges faced by the Maintenance and Operations teams. This afternoon is all about planning the project and answering the questions: How much will it cost to do this upgrade? When can we have it done by? What are the benefits of doing it?
What's your background?
I grew up on the Sunshine Coast and spent most of my time reading books and going to see metal bands. I moved to Brisbane to go to university and study Mechatronic Engineering at the University of Queensland. I rented rooms in share houses with my partner for the first couple of years, and then cheap apartments in Fortitude Valley for the last few. I mostly delivered pizzas up until fourth year where I found some work at a local digital marketing company developing apps. After I graduated, I worked with CSIRO’s robotics research group for a year before moving to BHP as a graduate in 2017.
As a first-year Graduate I was relocated to Moranbah and put in the site project delivery team. I’d never been to a mine site before and never managed a project, but the best way to learn something is to fail it at it until you learn. I learned a lot that year!
As a second-year Graduate I got myself rotated to our global Technology team based in Brisbane, where I worked on projects that were more “Mechatronics”. At the end of my graduate years, I was offered a role in the central Brisbane project delivery team where taking on bigger and bigger projects.
I still read books and go to see a lot of metal bands.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
Yes. Project managers don’t have to be technically excellent, and it’s normal to manage projects outside of your technical discipline. There is someone in our team with an HR degree managing engineering projects! What’s most important is to know enough to learn what you need to learn, and be okay with letting other people know the rest. By far the most important skills for a good project manager are soft skills: they’re the same skills that make great managers and great leaders.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
Scale. Mines are big. The equipment is big. Projects change something about our operations, which means our changes are also big, and the projects get big. There aren’t many jobs where you work with equipment the size of an apartment building and, except in senior management, measure your budget in the millions of dollars. The coolest thing about my job is seeing how my work changes something about the way the business mines and processes a critical commodity.
What are the limitations of your job?
Project management is best suited to confident people who thrive on change and responsibility.
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