About

Editor’s note: This interview was conducted prior to March 2020.

Yonni Fushman is executive vice president, chief legal officer and secretary. He holds executive responsibility for managing a broad portfolio of corporate services for the Aecon group of companies, including legal, corporate secretarial, risk management, ethics and compliance, insurance and bonding, and strategic planning services. When Fushman joined Aecon in 2005, a C$100m project would have been considered a significant deal. Recently, Aecon was awarded the C$5bn Eglinton Crosstown light rail project. Against that backdrop of extremely complex operations, the industry in recent years has moved to more aggressive contracts that shift risk to the contractor while providing only very narrow avenues for relief, he was instrumental in creating Project Excelsior and the following programmes were created to change the risk management standard of the organisation: A commercial risk committee (to review significant risks and provide guidance); training of project execution personnel; collecting lessons learned across projects; a risk evaluation committee (to monitor projects during execution); enterprise risk management to identify risks, generate a heat map and assign risk weightings; a risk committee of board of directors; and to ultimately develop a compliance function. Excelsior is seen as being innovative in the construction industry – a sector that does not necessarily embrace change. It involved the organisation from the board and senior executives through to those who execute the projects. Risk review committees, training and risk management invites participation of personnel with multidisciplinary backgrounds from throughout the business, and the legal department takes the lead in the education development and enterprise risk-management analysis. Fushman and the legal team at Aecon are innovative in terms of leading the way in communicating risk to the organisation and bridging the gap between legal, technical risk, and construction field experience.