The face of project evaluation is changing continuously, making it ever more critical to get a clear understanding upfront of the objectives, decision-making processes and criteria of the project proponents._x000D_
Requirements are usually significantly different for emerging juniors' compared with long established major mining houses and companies in developing countries compared with western companies. Requirements are also different for different types of evaluations, such as due diligence studies compared with feasibility studies of owned' projects and there are often key misunderstandings around the use of the term bankable'._x000D_
Further, it has become increasingly important with increasingly remote and lower quality resources to understand risk relativities such as infrastructure compared with the core processing facilities. This has also driven the need for more trade-off studies to determine the best balance between critical issues, such as optimisation of the interface between mine and processing plant, capital versus operating cost and automation versus labour._x000D_
In every project evaluation, it is also critical to consider emerging trends and changing requirements and standards such as sustainability and community interface._x000D_
Finally, the inescapable drive to reduce time to market has driven changes such as increased use of more standardised designs and innovative approaches to the transition from project development to execution._x000D_
This paper begins with a brief review of the different objectives and risks of each project development stage to establish a framework for subsequent discussion of the different requirements of different types of companies in different locations, different types of evaluations and different types of projects and project components. This is followed by a review of changing requirements and standards and some innovative developments in sustainability and community interface are presented. Finally, the paper outlines a number of developments in the area of operational readiness planning that focus on minimising the time to achieve maximum return on investment.