Susan Hughes is a water resources planner with 33 years of Planning and Policy experience with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at the district, division, and headquarters organizational levels. She is highly skilled in leading and executing complex and innovative projects and motivating teams to implement vision and achieve business goals at all organizational levels. She has a proven track record of leading multiple successful change initiatives at the national level and has 15 years of lead planner and project manager experience at the district level.

During Hughes’ career with the Corps, she led the development and successful implementation of a national Planning Program transformation that significantly improved the Corps Planning practice and set conditions for implementation of the new PR&G and continuous improvement and responsiveness to future water resources challenges and opportunities including climate change and expanding views on the typical Corps approach to benefit cost analyses.

Hughes oversaw the development of new planning policies, and procedures that encouraged incorporation of risk-informed decision making, led the development of a web-based toolkit that provides an actionable roadmap for successful implementation of SMART planning and organized and implemented a successful training program. She was actively involved in the Corps assimilation of risk-informed decision making and was a lead participant in the development of the agency’s enterprise risk management regulation and practical implementation strategies.

In the later part of her Corps career Hughes transferred from the Headquarters to the Southwestern Division to be more directly involved in leading field-level implementation of the newly developed planning policies and practices and to manage the regions significant Hurricane Harvey response efforts along the Texas Coast. She led teams through the completion of 1 Directors Report and 5 Chiefs Reports in a single year and created an environment for innovation in benefit cost analysis by incorporation of life safety and other societal, economic, and environmental risks into benefit cost analyses.