Programme Risk Lead — National Highways QRA Framework

The brief

AtkinsRéalis holds the Quantitative Risk Analysis commission that supports National Highways’ Regional Investment Programme. With £1bn+ of major schemes in play and governance oversight across multiple delivery partners, the commission needed senior QRA practitioners who could both run the modelling discipline at project level and act as a programme-level subject-matter expert at portfolio scale.

SOMA was engaged to lead Quantitative Cost and Schedule Risk Analysis (QCRA / QSRA) delivery across the regional portfolio — challenging modelling assumptions, aligning quantitative outputs with budgets and governance reporting, and strengthening the way QRA evidence fed into decision-making.

Our role

Two overlapping roles across the engagement:

• Programme Risk Lead — portfolio-level QRA subject-matter expert, setting QCRA / QSRA standards, reviewing supplier analyses, and presenting quantitative risk insight to senior regional stakeholders.
• Regional Risk Assurance Lead (Yorkshire & North East) — project controls (risk) assurance across a >£1bn regional portfolio, governance oversight of supplier QCRA / QSRA activity, independent reviews and quantitative risk health-checks, and monthly / quarterly assurance reports.
• Interim Regional Risk Manager — earlier in the commission, seconded to oversee multiple highway schemes: reviewed and enhanced regional risk governance, embedded a structured risk-drawdown process, delivered training and workshop facilitation, and improved reporting alignment.

What we delivered

The engagement combined hands-on QRA delivery with governance uplift:

• QCRA run monthly and QSRA quarterly across the regional portfolio, with outputs calibrated to project budgets and governance milestones.
• Bespoke KPI templates and automated Safran inputs — simplifying QRA assurance activity and reclaiming weeks of project-team time over the commission.
• Structured risk-drawdown process embedded across regional schemes, giving delivery teams a defensible way to release contingency.
• System transition from Xactium to RiskHive, with supply-chain risk resources onboarded and upskilled on the new tooling.
• Portfolio-level QRA coaching and 1-to-1 mentoring with regional risk practitioners, lifting quantitative maturity across the commission.

What changed

The QRA function moved from a presentation of outputs to a presentation of insight. Assumption challenge, risk mapping, and the link between schedule uncertainty and cost exposure became the centre of QRA reviews — not the Monte Carlo curve itself. Senior regional leaders now use QRA as a decision tool, not a governance artefact.