Coordinating 300 Contractors at Peak on a $1.1M Shutdown, Delivered On Time and On Budget

Sector: Coal mining, shutdown maintenance
Scale: $1.1M project value as budgeted, up to 300 contractors at peak
Constraint: A contractual shutdown window with a fixed start and a fixed finish
Result window: The shutdown itself

How to read this: I delivered this work in a prior operational role, on the payroll, before founding Ridgway Resilience. I include it because the discipline it required is the same discipline the Schedule Reset applies, at a smaller scale and against a longer horizon.

The Situation

A shutdown at Goonyella Riverside, budgeted at $1.1M, with the workforce peaking at around 300 contractors working across day and night crews. The window was contractual. The plant came down on a fixed date and had to be back up on a fixed date, and no part of that was negotiable once the outage started.

What the Job Actually Is at That Headcount

At 300 people the binding constraint stops being trade skill and becomes sequence and access. There is no shortage of capable tradespeople on a shutdown of that size. What runs short is space at the work face, the right permit at the right hour, the isolation that has to be in place before the next crew can start, and the part that has to be on the ground before anybody walks up to the job.

Those constraints do not announce themselves during the outage. They are set weeks earlier, when the work is sequenced or is not.

What Was Done

The schedule was baselined in Primavera P6 before the window opened, and progress was statused against that baseline rather than against opinion. Day and night crews ran on different calendars, so the schedule had to carry more than one working pattern at once and still resolve to a single critical path.

Each activity was issued as an execution-ready work package covering labour, materials, tooling, permits, and safety documentation. The package is what turns a bar on a chart into work a crew can actually start, and it is the piece most often left until the morning it is needed.

Results

• Delivered on time and on budget, measured against the Primavera P6 baseline set before the window opened

Why There Is No Recovery Figure on This Page

The $1.1M is the project value as budgeted. It is not a saving and it is not presented as one.

Pricing what an overrun would have cost is possible in principle, but it needs the operator's throughput and price assumptions, and those were not mine to hold and are not held now. A figure built without them would be an invention with a dollar sign on it. On time and on budget against a declared baseline is the measured result, so that is the result published.

The Point

A shutdown date does not move, so everything else has to. The schedule is the only place that flexibility can live, and it can only absorb what was sequenced before the window opened. Work that arrives unsequenced during an outage does not get absorbed; it gets paid for in overtime, in standing time, or in a late restart.

The same thing is true of a contractor's forward book. It just runs over months instead of days, which makes it easier to ignore until two crews are booked to the same week.

The Next Step

I now do this work for maintenance and mechanical contractors in Mackay, the Bowen Basin, and Central Queensland as the Schedule Reset: a fixed-price, two-week engagement, delivered remotely, that consolidates the forward book, shows where the crews are double-booked, and names what cannot start on the date currently promised. If you are carrying a run of shutdowns and the sequencing lives in somebody's head, ring 0493 262 725 or start at www.ridgwayresilience.com.