The last hole's been drilled and the rig's demobilised when someone asks when the report will land. The answer usually comes with a range attached, somewhere between 30 and 120 days, depending on the lab.
That range sits at the back end of a program that most teams only schedule in part. The drilling gets a proper plan. Everything around it gets a rough buffer in a spreadsheet, because nobody's timed how long those stages take.
The program most teams schedule When people hear "exploration program," they usually picture the drilling. That's when the program's busiest, with drillers on site and the budget moving fastest. It's also the stretch with the best tracking, since rig schedules and Plods give you a clear view of what's happening.
Before the rig turns up, there's planning and approvals. After it packs up, there's still a bunch of post-drilling work that needs to happen and reporting that follows. Each of those stages has a duration, and each one feeds the next.
Even when a team does schedule the whole thing, it usually lives in a separate spreadsheet from the field data, so the plan never gets compared against what actually happened. Without actuals, people end up winging it with a conservative buffer, because they just don't know how long things take. Stack enough of those buffers and the program ends up being a long way from reality.
Lab turnaround is the clearest gap Some of the mining companies I've spoken to can't tell you how long their lab turnaround runs. That makes sense once you look at how many moving parts it has. Samples have to reach the lab and wait their turn, then get assayed and returned as pulps.
Each part is its own wait and most teams don't record any of them. So the schedule gets a single number, often a round 90-120 days, because the real figure could be 30 but nobody can say for sure.
That doubt flows through to everything after it. Reports finish later than they could have and the next program can't start planning until the results are in. If the lab actually turns samples around in 40 days, a 120 day allowance leaves 80 days of schedule you never needed.
What you find when you time the whole program Once you track a program end to end, the bottlenecks show up where you'd expect and in a few places you wouldn't. Planning can run longer than anyone remembers. A lab can be slower than its quote. Either one might point to a decision, like switching labs or splitting work across two, that nobody had enough evidence to make before.
We saw the same thing with rig schedules . Just being able to see the plan changed the conversation, before anyone had made it any smarter.
You can start with a spreadsheet. On your next program, record when each stage starts and finishes, and what it was waiting on. After one program you'll have real durations to plan the next one from.
.png)
.svg){kind=small}
