Britain’s TV Switch to IP: The Program Is About the Exceptions

In Brief

Britain already knows that television over IP works.

The difficult part of the national transition is not the millions of households for whom it already works perfectly well. It is the exceptions – and there will be millions of them.

Those exceptions can be grouped: affordability, connectivity, accessibility, digital confidence, resilience and other practical circumstances.

Britain’s transition to IP television will not be a conventional, linear rollout program. Millions of households will make the switch relatively easily.

The national challenge lies in the exceptions – households facing different combinations of inadequate connectivity, unsuitable equipment, difficult housing arrangements, affordability problems or a need for individual assistance.

These exceptions will be scattered across the country, often requiring several organisations to act together to resolve a single case.

As the straightforward households migrate, those remaining are likely to become progressively more difficult and expensive to serve.

This is not simply a technology migration. It is a formidable national execution challenge, and one for which the strength of the delivery system will ultimately determine the outcome.

A substantial piece of spadework is needed to identify the exception groups, understand where they occur, validate the assumptions around them and design the processes needed to deal with each one.

Treat this as a straightforward national migration and it could become close to an impossible execution task.

That work needs to start sooner rather than later.

 

The exceptions are not at the edge of the program. They are the program.

 

The easy cases prove very little

The debate between 2034 and 2044 matters because infrastructure investment decisions have to be made over long cycles.

But the dates can become a complete red herring if we lose sight of what the program is actually about.

Some households will have affordability problems. Others will face connectivity, accessibility, resilience or digital-confidence issues.

Some of the hardest exceptions may arise from suppliers, infrastructure, resources, dependencies and decisions rather than from consumers at all.

At a gross level, many of these categories are already understood.

The harder question is whether we have identified them at sufficient depth, validated the assumptions around them and understood how they interact well enough to make a national target date believable.

Knowing the categories is not the same as knowing the program.

 

What makes this an eight-to-ten-year program?

Ofcom has warned that changing Britain’s television distribution model will take eight to ten years and that an unmanaged transition involving many organisations making individual decisions could become chaotic.

There are understandable reasons why it might take that long: broadband take-up, consumer support, accessibility, network capacity, resilience and infrastructure changes all take time.

But an execution question follows:

What actually makes this an eight-to-ten-year program?

Which activities determine the timescale? Which exceptions are hardest to resolve? Which dependencies sit on the critical path? What must happen sequentially rather than in parallel?

And what assumptions are carrying the date?

Take resources.

Do they genuinely exist, or are they notional?

It is not enough to conclude that the capability exists somewhere in an organisation or somewhere in the market.

Do we know where the people are? Will they be available when required? Are they sufficiently skilled and experienced? Can they operate at the pace the program demands? That distinction between nominal capability and usable capacity matters enormously.

 

From the model to three feet

Ofcom and government may already have modelled the principal transition options in considerable detail. That is exactly what we would expect.

But models necessarily abstract from reality.

The harder question is what appears when the transition gets down to the three-foot level: real households, real infrastructure, real suppliers, real resources, real support arrangements and real dependencies.

That is also where exceptions may appear that a high-level model was never designed to expose.

Government work has concluded that Britain has the underlying technical capability to move fully to IPTV, provided a substantial number of conditions are met.

Broadband availability and take-up must be sufficient. Networks need the necessary capacity and resilience. Affordability and consumer support have to be addressed.

Investment, responsibilities, costs and technical standards need to line up.

That may all be perfectly reasonable.

But it still demonstrates theoretical feasibility rather than deliverability.

 

That ought to work

At policy level, it is perfectly reasonable to conclude that something ought to be capable of working.

The danger comes when “that ought to work” begins to harden into a delivery assumption before it has been validated at sufficient depth.

Plausible assumptions can be surprisingly easy to get through the planning process. They fit the model, support the milestones and help the date look credible.

What planning does not always do, especially on a program of this scale, is establish whether the system charged with execution can actually make those assumptions true.

We have repeatedly seen plausible assumptions survive planning and then rapidly disintegrate when they meet the practical realities of execution.

 

That ought to work, is not the same as evidence that it will work.

 

That’s why identifying assumptions is not enough.

They have to be validated.

Until they have been tested deeply enough – across resources, skills, suppliers, dependencies, consumer behaviour, decisions and the difficult exceptions – the date remains an aspiration supported by a model rather than a commitment supported by evidence.

 

What 30 years of execution teaches you

Mentor has spent more than 30 years delivering and recovering large, complex programs where failure had serious commercial and operational consequences.

Television gives us a couple of useful reference points. We were involved in the launch of Channel 5 and later in Digital Terrestrial Television.

But the lessons are much broader than broadcasting.

Across network rollouts, integrations, infrastructure builds, transformations and recoveries, the technologies and organisations change.

The execution questions are remarkably familiar.

Is the target grounded in reality? Have the assumptions actually been tested? Are the resources genuinely available? Can suppliers deliver at the required pace? Are the dependencies understood end to end? Do the people carrying accountability have enough authority to act?

Above all, is there a coherent “delivery system” capable of turning the commitment into the promised outcome?

By delivery system, we mean the people, authority, decisions, suppliers, resources, dependencies, sequencing, information and operating arrangements that make the program happen.

A large program becomes deliverable only when those elements work together as one system.

 

When a date becomes a commitment

We have recovered many programs that began with a date.

The target was set, people worked backwards from it and a perfectly respectable plan was constructed deductively.

There is nothing wrong with that as a starting point.

The mistake is failing to establish very soon afterwards whether the delivery system can actually do what the plan assumes.

Too often that test happens only after the date has hardened into a commitment.

The Emergency Services Network (ESN) is a sobering public example.

ESN began with target dates that envisaged emergency services starting to move in 2017 and Airwave being replaced by the end of 2019.

The National Audit Office warned that the timetable was ambitious and that risks were being underrated. By 2017, the Home Office itself had concluded that its delivery approach was not achievable.

ESN was another example of a major program committing to dates – before the delivery system underneath had been shown to be capable of carrying the commitment.

The obvious response in television is that IPTV technology is already proven.

It is.

But proven technology does not prove that the program is deliverable.

 

The program will reflect the system beneath it

A program is ultimately a byproduct of the delivery system that produces it.

The dates, milestones, costs and benefits in a plan all contain assumptions about what that system can do.

If those assumptions are wrong, the outcome exposes them.

Authority does not match accountability. A critical resource turns out to be committed elsewhere. Suppliers work to different incentives. Dependencies are understood individually but not end to end. Decisions sit somewhere they cannot be made quickly enough.

Everybody can be competent and busy while the overall system remains incapable of producing what has been promised.

There is also a point where complexity, pace, dependencies, suppliers, interfaces, decision demands and resource requirements exceed the capability of the system carrying them.

We call that the “execution threshold”.

Crossing it is rarely dramatic.

Meetings continue. Reports are produced. Workstreams remain active.

What starts to disappear is the ability of the whole system to keep everything sufficiently aligned to produce the outcome.

Then problems compound.

A delayed decision affects an investment somewhere else. A supplier misses a timetable another organisation has already assumed. A resource everyone thought existed turns out not to be available.

That is when delay becomes really expensive.

 

Recovery is the expensive option

A large part of Mentor’s work over the years has been program recovery.

In many assignments, we did not arrive to find a coherent delivery system that merely needed improvement.

There effectively wasn’t one capable of carrying the commitment, so we had to rebuild it while the program was already moving.

By then money had been spent. Suppliers had mobilised. Commitments had been made. Options available at the beginning had disappeared.

Recovery at that stage is not merely inconvenient.

It is expensive in a big-ticket way.

It means repairing the delivery system while continuing to carry the commitment it was supposed to deliver.

It consumes management attention, adds cost, creates delay and often requires decisions that would have been unnecessary had the weakness been identified earlier.

Across the programs we have recovered, once we rebuilt the underlying delivery system and made it capable of carrying the commitment, we did not then see the program go down.

That is not a theoretical observation.

It is a delivery record.

 

What fails at limited scale can still be fixed. What fails after national commitment becomes recovery.

 

Making the transition real

None of this is intended as criticism of policy work.

Policy papers necessarily deal in options, assumptions, conditions and choices.

Execution has to make those things concrete.

Set the target. Identify the assumptions beneath it. Validate those assumptions against the delivery system that will have to make them true.

Then establish explicit readiness criteria and test the system in the real world before scaling nationally.

A vanguard exercise could be one way of doing that.

But designing it properly would itself be substantial work.

The exceptions will not sit conveniently in one place or share one cause. A credible vanguard could not simply choose one geography, demonstrate that IPTV works there and declare success.

It would need to be designed deliberately around the different classes of exception most likely to challenge the delivery system.

Which conditions need testing? Where do they occur? How do they interact? Which organisations need to participate? Which dependencies need to be exercised end to end? What evidence would constitute success?

Done properly, this would not be a demonstration project.

It would be a demanding test of the delivery system before weaknesses are multiplied nationally.

And that spadework needs to begin early.

 

Who owns whether it works?

Many organisations are already responsible for parts of this transition.

But responsibility for individual components is not the same as accountability for the national outcome.

A credible national delivery system has to expose the dependencies between those organisations, reconcile different assumptions, establish where decisions must be made and by whom, and demonstrate that the necessary capacity and capability actually exist.

It also needs to recognise when the transition is approaching its execution threshold.

Without that, Britain does not have one coherent transition plan.

It has a collection of plans belonging to organisations that each control only part of the outcome.

That is precisely the environment in which individually sensible decisions can combine to produce a very unsatisfactory result.

 

Let’s remind ourselves what this program is about

Britain will continue moving towards television delivered over IP.

The 2034-versus-2044 debate matters because infrastructure investment decisions need certainty over long periods.

But moving the date does not remove the underlying execution challenge.

 

2034 is a target. 2044 is a target. Neither is a plan

It is worth bearing in mind that neither of these dates tells us how Britain’s transition to IP television will actually be delivered.

They establish an ambition, but they say nothing about the delivery system needed to achieve it, the dependencies between the organisations involved, the decisions that must be taken, or how the thousands of exceptions will be resolved.

A credible plan must demonstrate how those things will be managed, by whom, with what authority and resources, and in what sequence.

Without that, the dates are little more than a pipe dream, however confidently they are presented.

The job now is to build clear evidence that the delivery system can deal with them before Britain commits itself.

 

The exceptions are not at the edge of the program. They are the program.

 

About the author

David Hilliard is Founder of Mentor, execution specialists in strategic program execution.