Understanding the art of risk management

How the value placed on risk management has changed over the last decade

More than a decade on from joining Mott MacDonald to head up risk management, Hazel Arthur looks at how her team has evolved to match client’s needs.

Art school or a degree in risk management. Those were the two choices faced by 18-year-old Hazel Arthur but it was her desire to make a difference to the world around her that won out. Today she is technical director for risk at Mott MacDonald and her creative side drives her to think differently, rather than create artwork, as well as inspire the team she has built around her over the last 10 years.

Risk managers from Hazel’s team are embedded across key projects for the major infrastructure programme at Devonport Dockyard

Over the last decade, Hazel has seen a change in how infrastructure clients view risk, with it becoming a central part of projects. For her, this is marked by the team starting to win contracts focused solely on risk, rather being part of larger contracts.

According to Hazel, the aim is to be a critical friend and aid a cultural shift within client organisations. She adds that more clients are looking at how to better utilise limited resources and want to understand the key actions that can be taken to manage and reduce risk.

“In the past there has been a general infrastructure industry acceptance of overruns on time and costs,” says Hazel. “Now organisations want robust, data-driven risk frameworks that monitor risk provision and plan for how best to utilise this in their forecasts. The appetite for risk is very different from 20 years ago when there was more of an attitude of ‘well, if I don't set the right baseline and I don't have sufficient risk provision, I can always go back and ask for more’.”

Changing industry

The change in the risk management sector over the last two decades is something Hazel has seen firsthand since she graduated from Glasgow Caledonian University with a degree in risk management. From there, she joined Network Rail and became the first graduate to join the rail infrastructure body’s risk team, which underlines how the risk management sector has evolved from an emerging discipline to be more mainstream since that time.

In addition to converting her knowledge from theory to practical application, Hazel highlights that one of the key insights she gained through her work on Network Rail’s Scotland Regional Infrastructure Programme was the need to engage and communicate with people to properly assess risk.

“It was also a very male-dominated sector at the time and I learned to adapt my behaviour to control a room effectively and play to my strength, which was always questioning how things work,” she adds.

Her efforts were rewarded by being asked to cover her manager’s maternity leave just a few years after starting with Network Rail and, in doing so, she became one of the of the youngest regional managers within the organisation at the time. This change of role switched/evolved Hazel’s mindset from working on individual projects to thinking more strategically about how to run a whole region as well as manage and develop the teams working in the region.

Having enjoyed her leadership role, Hazel moved to LSC Group, a small consultancy firm in Bristol, which was later acquired by Babcock Analytics, to build on her experience at Network Rail. There, her work was focused on the defence sector where Hazel worked on the Expeditionary Campaign Infrastructure for Afghanistan. She transitioned from considering risk in 15-minute intervals as she had at Network Rail, to looking at it over longer periods and using risk analysis more effectively.

Risk focused team

When she moved to Mott MacDonald in 2014, her first task was to look at how risk management could take a complex project from being too expensive with a programme that didn’t meet the client’s needs to one that could be delivered with certainty within budget and time.

“At the time, there were lots of people in Mott MacDonald undertaking risk work in different pockets of the business but there was no central or connected risk team, so when I joined, my aim was to build a team and start to offer risk management as a specific service,” she explains.

The work delivered by Hazel’s growing team on the project helped to demonstrate the value a dedicated risk team could bring, both within Mott MacDonald colleagues in the wider business and to clients.

“Originally the programme was set up like lots of individual projects,” she explains. “And each project was looking at its risks separately but when we set up the framework to look at risk across the programme and link it to operations on site, we were able to see the issues more clearly. Often the risks that each project focused on, weren’t the ones that were actually disrupting the programme.”

“Using the framework, we could use risk to inform decisions across multiple competing stakeholders and take the emotions out of those decisions. Through that we could work out what was best for the programme and what was best for the client for the operation of their facility too.”

“Initially the programme was unaffordable and undeliverable because of the disruption to the operational site. Using the risk framework, we were able to smooth out the programme to make it deliverable and address the funding gap at that time.”

Growing demand

That project first of many that Hazel’s risk team has supported over the last decade. As demand increased, the team has grown to more than 30 people as a result of increasing demand from Mott MacDonald’s clients for better risk management during the early stages of projects to set them up for long-term success.

“Greater public scrutiny of government spending means there is a growing need to show how that money or time will be well spent and risk management will be key to demonstrating that,” says Hazel in explaining the expected growth in demand. However, her team’s approach to supporting clients through this process is less about hand holding and more about upskilling the client on risk management.

“The way we approach risk analysis is not transactional. We don’t take a schedule and the risk data and just provide an output – the way we work is more interactive and workshop based, so we fully understand the client’s needs and the challenges of the project,” explains Hazel. She believes that this not only gives the client the best outcome, but it also keeps the work interesting for her team too, whether it is a standalone project or part of the larger infrastructure projects delivered by the wider Mott MacDonald business.

It is clear that Hazel has enjoyed being at the forefront of risk management change over the last 20 years and is aiming to be part of the ongoing transformation too.