Hear from Susan Hill about her role as an Operational Resilience Lead!

Hi, I’m Susan and I’ve worked as Operational Resilience Lead for 2 years. I’ve put together a little introduction to my role.

Working within Operational Resilience, you spend an awful lot of time preparing for something you hope never happens. A huge part of my role involves working with teams across the campus to ensure what we’re doing in Airport Operations and Service works alongside our preparedness, response and recovery activities airport-wide. It’s absolutely critical that we work together to embrace business continuity, because 90% of incident management is about the relationships you’ve built along the way.

The textbook answer for ‘what is operational resilience?’ would be, it’s all about 5 key activities; Assessment of risk, Prevention of incidents occurring, Preparation for managing disruption, Responding to incidents and events before Recovering and learning from what has taken place. But if you’re new to this; the important thing to remember is that a prepared operation that can adapt to and learn from disruption, is in itself a resilient operation.

What does day-to-day look like?

For me, continuous improvement is a key element of being resilient, so I spend time reviewing incidents, events and contingency plans; learning from what has happened and adapting our response to make it even more effective next time. If I’m not reviewing actions and plans, I’ll be building contingency plans, understanding the ‘what ifs’ of an incident and what a ‘new normal’ could look like while we try to manage the disruption.

Before a plan goes live of course, it needs to be exercised – so I also create exercises; discussion-based, live or table top. And aside from that, I work on planning for events that could potentially be quite disruptive – French Rugby, Royal Highland Show, Commonwealth Games. Again, working with lots of different teams to understand the potential pinch points and putting mitigation in place to reduce the impact of disruption.

What do I enjoy about my role?

I’ve got a bit of a butterfly mind at times – I get easily distracted and find myself going between one of two extremes; full concentration, losing track of time on one activity to jumping between 10 different things all of a completely different nature. So the airport environment allows me to balance those two extremes with the responsibilities I have.

I’m also all about the detail, learning about how others operate fascinates me – with operational resilience, I get to understand the detail of one particular response across multiple teams and watch it fit together like a jigsaw when used in anger or through exercises.

And when it comes to the events planning side of things, I’ve always quite enjoyed organising, mapping things out and finding fixes (because where there’s a will, there’s a way, isn’t there?) so with any type of event, it’s that very process; thinking of all the details, what will be impacted, can we do anything about that or do we accept the disruption?

But also, it’s bringing others into the airport environment. I love my job and I want to share our best practices and learn from others in the resilience industry about how they manage their business continuity. It’s a transferrable discipline, so it allows me to take part in much wider discussions about managing risk. Again, coming back to working with agencies and individuals to develop the most effective plans.