Construction Leader: AtkinsRéalis’ James Butler on the global company making a local impact
James Butler
During a visit to Aberdeen, James Butler from AtkinsRéalis catches up with Colin Cardwell to outline the encouraging future in store for the company in Scotland.
You can’t be an effective leader from behind a computer screen. That’s one of the maxims that informs James Butler’s role as UK managing director of the project and programme services division of AtkinsRéalis, a global design, engineering and project management company.
With 2,000 staff working in project and programme services, and 40 offices in the UK, he spends a lot of time travelling around the country. “Then it’s about keeping eye contact with the local teams”, he says. “I try to make sure I’m visible and spend time in all our offices, with all our teams.”
And there are rules for these visits. “One is that there’s no ‘red carpet’,” he says. “I don’t want to distract people from focusing on one another and delivering a great service to our clients.”
When we speak, the youthful Butler is in an unseasonably sunny Aberdeen, talking with a local team that he says are “experts in the local market, particularly from a social infrastructure perspective, delivering schools and housing projects, while other parts of the business might well be focused on the type of mega projects to which you need to bring the best global resource in order to deliver them”.
Summerhill in Aberdeen
The scope of the company’s projects is, frankly, enormous. AtkinsRéalis has its global HQ in Montreal and was formerly three brands under one group: Canadian engineering firm SNC-Lavalin, alongside UK-based Atkins and Faithful+Gould. AtkinsRéalis today has some 40,000 staff worldwide and its portfolio includes design, consultancy and financing in areas such as road, railways, nuclear and aviation as well as housing and commercial and public sector buildings.
SNC Lavalin acquired Atkins and Faithful+Gould in 2017, then underwent a rebrand in 2023, which was one of the biggest opportunities Butler had encountered. “All parts of business now use the AtkinsRéalis name, which makes complete sense as a business. It’s easier for our clients to understand and it also allows us to invest in a single brand more heavily than in multiple brands,” he says.
Now the UK and Ireland comprise a significant part of the Toronto Stock Exchange-listed group with 13,000 people, of whom some 950 are based in Scotland, where prospects are, he says, very encouraging, including the recent move to a new office in Edinburgh.
“However, rather than travel for one event when I come to Scotland I try to use that time wisely and be cognisant of travel costs and the carbon perspective so I’ll spend a bit of time in the Aberdeen office, in our Glasgow office and Edinburgh office – and do whatever else might add value during that week. I can’t keep improving the business without knowing how our people are generally feeling and getting feedback from our clients.”
AtkinsRéalis is, he adds, a global consultancy but one very much focused on local delivery. “We pride ourselves in making sure our local teams have access to the best-in-class tools when it comes to digital advancements, people and experience. Our clients can expect the same results if we build an academic, research or business institute for a university in the south-west of England or a similar project in Edinburgh, where we opened a new office last year.”
Edinburgh Futures Institute
“We want to make sure we’re sharing that best practice, meaning our clients can get the benefit of us being able to construct in a more affordable way and delivering a better-quality building at the end of it. And we ensure we do that without losing the local focus that our people and our clients really value,” he says.
A good example of this is the new Edinburgh Futures Institute, delivered via SCAPE Scotland – a not-for-profit organisation providing procurement frameworks to enable public sector organisations to deliver its projects. In the two years since being appointed as its sole partner on the Consultancy Built Environment framework, AtkinsRéalis is well on the way to completing 100 projects, each one aimed at delivering substantial social impact.
“The relationship with SCAPE has been very positive and enduring. I came across them quite early in my career and it’s one of the first frameworks that we have supported across the whole of the UK, alongside other national frameworks such as Pagabo and CCS. It’s an illustration of how successful construction relies on collaboration and being able to work with the client to develop a brief,” says Butler.
“That ensures we can provide service at the right price point and deliver great value to them – and when they haven’t time or it isn’t appropriate to go through a full-scale procurement, we can do the hard work for them. We’re in the fortunate position as a business in having lots of great routes and excellent procurement vehicles to serve clients.”
Edinburgh Futures Institute
Butler first took a degree in engineering then worked for a pharmaceutical company but says: “I’d also always had a bit of a passion for construction and developing property and whenever I’d walk past a construction site, I’d stop to look and think about how it was working and what they were doing and had a great interest in that.”
After applying for some graduate schemes, the then Faithful+Gould was the first to offer him a place and supported him through a part-time master’s degree in construction management and his APC (Assessment of Professional Competence) to become a chartered building surveyor.
After regional roles in London and the south east, that turned into a UK and Ireland-wide role during which time Faithful+Gould doubled in size in three years.
“I love being part of a growing businesses, not just for the financial benefits of satisfying shareholders – though that’s obviously important – but more because of the impact it has on the people as you tend to be promoting them, recruiting more people and presenting more opportunities and more diverse experiences for people in a growing business. And in a company this size I can say that there are thousands of good roles they could be stepping up into it at some point.
“I have a passion for that, which may have come from the continuous improvement work that I did during my placement and I guess that’s why I’m out and about regularly, because I genuinely have the view that you can’t help to improve things if you’re not close to people and understand the challenges they have – trying to find the solutions.”
The company has, he says, enjoyed steady growth over the past few years in Scotland. “We absolutely want that to continue and it’s largely in response to the size of the market and the amount of work that’s out there and that we can secure. So long as the pipeline continues to be strong, we will continue to look to grow and create exciting jobs for people in Scotland in the future.”
He recalls taking special pleasure in attending some recent school openings. “Sitting there you see the quality of the space that’s been built and realise that tens of thousands of young people will go through that school during its lifetime, probably learning more than they would have done in a less modern environment and with the potential to go on to do great things.
“My proudest moments when I was delivering projects was small housing schemes, where we were working with local authorities that hadn’t done anything of that type for decades.
“There was a particular one where I knew the standard of living the people had previously and the difference it made for them through moving into a pleasant, efficient and safe environment. Seeing those outcomes that we can achieve for people and the potential it provides is exciting.”