Meet Matthew Hancock, Principal Project Manager at ABL Aberdeen
The team at ABL Group shares the passion, vision and values for working in energy and the world’s oceans, de-risking and driving the energy transition. We are driven by the idea that the best work is born from professionalism, diligence… and fun. You know ABL Group, but do you know our team?
Give us a glimpse into your day-to-day work at ABL in Aberdeen. What keeps you on your toes?
My days are a mix of planning, coordinating, and problem-solving, usually across several projects at once. Working with our technical team on deliverables, ensuring our project leads have everything they need to get the desired results from a project, and ensuring our projects are resourced appropriately.
An important part of my role is also account management and business development support, keeping a close eye on planned vs actual performance, spotting upcoming opportunities early, and helping turn good project outcomes into account growth.
What keeps me on my toes is the variety – balancing client priorities, internal workloads, and the inevitable last-minute changes.
What drew you to the industry, and what keeps you passionate about it?
What we do has real consequences for safety, reliability, and performance. What keeps me passionate is the teamwork, bringing the right people together, getting a plan to work, and delivering something the client can trust.
Can you tell us about something exciting you are working on right now?
Within the FPSO sector, we have been working closely with owners and operators to provide end-to-end CMMS and engineering support. This covers PoB analysis at the FEED stage, full CMMS builds and as-built reviews for new assets and redevelopments for existing assets.
We have also delivered technical due diligence, CMMS gap analyses, and practical improvement roadmaps to help drive long-term performance and assurance.
What does the future of energy and oceans look like right now?
Right now, the future of energy and oceans within the oil and gas space looks towards getting more value from existing assets, operating safely for longer, and proving performance with data.
The CMMS is at the centre of that, providing the data, governance, and auditable work management that underpins strong asset integrity.
What are the biggest AIM challenges facing FPSOs today, and how does your work support safe, effective life extension of these assets?
As mentioned above, one of the biggest AIM challenges facing FPSOs today is getting more value from existing and potentially aging assets. Many FPSOs are being required to exceed their original design life, which increases exposure to corrosion, fatigue, equipment obsolescence and structural degradation.
At the same time, operators face rising regulatory scrutiny, pressure to reduce costs, limited access to high-quality historic data, and the need to maintain high levels of safety, reliability and uptime. A well implemented CMMS can address these challenges by acting as the single point of record for equipment/asset maintenance and integrity data.
The work ABL’s Asset Integrity Management (AIM) team carries out can support the safe and effective life extension of FPSOs by applying a structured, process-based approach to Asset Integrity Management. Through ABL AIM scopes, we improve CMMS data quality and structure, integrating maintenance, inspection and engineering data, which also enables the client to capture degradation, failures and identify anomalies at asset level.
By turning complex technical information into clear reasoning for decisions, the work we do can help enable continued operation while ensuring risks are understood, managed and kept as low as reasonably practicable, protecting people and the asset.
More about Matthew
Position: Principal Project Manager
Office: Aberdeen
Hobbies: Football, Golf, Snooker
Favourite film/music: Film: Shawshank redemption. Music: anything from Pearl Jam’s album “Ten” or Taylor Swift
