Telecoms Doesn’t. The Interesting Question Is Why Some Leaders Do.

Telecoms is the exception

In every high-risk industry, independent review is built in.

·  In aviation, you do not certify your own aircraft

·  In pharmaceuticals, you do not validate your own trials

·  In nuclear and defence, you do not mark your own homework

It is standard practice. It protects these industries from their own blind spots.

Regulators focus on market outcomes and competition. They do not regulate execution risk. That gap is left to the industry – and it is where many programs start to come under pressure.

And yet, within that same industry, a very small number of leaders have started to behave differently.

They don’t rely on internal confidence alone.

They choose to test it.

What makes these programs different

The UK telecoms industry is running some of the most complex programs in the country.

·  Full fibre rollout to millions of premises

·  Network integrations following multi-billion pound mergers

·  Copper retirement affecting every home and business

·  Data centre builds driven by AI demand

On paper, these programs are coherent.

In reality, they are tightly coupled systems. Small movements in one area begin to pull everything else out of sync.

By any sensible measure, they are high risk.

And yet most are approved on a level of evidence that other high-risk industries would simply not accept.

Plans are reviewed internally. Progress is reported through governance designed by the delivery teams. Assumptions are tested – if they are tested at all – by the same teams that made them.

This is not a capability issue.

Most teams are experienced, committed, and under pressure. But they are often working to targets they had little influence over. In many cases, they are told to make it happen.

No excuses.

In that environment, testing the plan before committing to it is not the default move.

But it is a revealing one.

Why this persists

The absence of independent review in telecoms is not accidental. It is structural.

There is no external forcing mechanism. No requirement to test whether plans will hold before commitments are made.

Programs are approved on the strength of internal plans – often built under commercial pressure, with timelines set early and quickly turned into firm commitments.

From that point on, the system is geared towards delivery against those commitments.

Governance reinforces this. It tracks progress. It rarely tests whether the plan itself is sound.

Raising fundamental questions carries political cost. So the program moves forward.

Not because the assumptions are convincing – but because the organisation has already backed them.

The consequences, when they come, are absorbed over time.

Delay. Cost overrun. Reduced scope. A quiet reset of expectations.

The system moves on.

Which is why most programs are still approved on internal confidence.

And a very small number are not.

What the best leaders do differently

The leaders who bring in independent review early are not looking for reassurance.

They are looking for clarity.

They want to know which assumptions will hold – and which won’t survive first contact with reality.

They want to see how the program behaves when dependencies interact, when sequencing tightens, when trade-offs become unavoidable.

They want that view while they still have options.

Because once a program is in full flight, those options begin to close.

Nothing dramatic marks that moment. Reporting can still show progress. Milestones can still turn green.

But underneath, the arithmetic is already asserting itself.

And the room to manoeuvre is shrinking.

What happens if you don’t

Without that early test, the pattern is familiar.

A program reported as “on track” is often tracking against assumptions that have never been validated.

A merger integration that looked manageable exposes execution gaps that should have been visible months earlier.

A rollout reaches 60 percent of plan and the organisation assumes – because there are no incentives to say otherwise – that recovery is still possible.

Until the arithmetic says it isn’t.

By the time this becomes visible through normal governance, the position is already constrained.

Options narrow.

Costs rise.

Timelines move.

The conversation shifts – quietly – from delivery to containment.

What independent review actually does

An independent review does one thing.

It answers a question internal governance cannot answer cleanly:

Is this program executable under real conditions?

Not in theory. Not on a slide. Under real conditions.

Answering that requires distance – and experience of how similar programs behave when pressure builds.

It also requires saying things plainly.

·  That key assumptions have not been tested

·  That dependencies are more fragile than they appear

·  That the current trajectory will not deliver what has been committed

None of this is usually a surprise.

The people closest to the program already sense where the weaknesses are.

What is missing is not awareness. It is permission.

It is the mechanism to surface that reality early – while something can still be done about it.

What it costs to find out early

A Pre-Turbulence Review takes a few days. A small team. Minimal disruption.

A full independent review takes longer – but still represents a fraction of the program’s cost.

The real cost sits elsewhere.

·  Months of delay

·  Avoidable overruns

·  Commitments that have to be reset without a trumpet blast

The pattern is consistent.

Leaders who test their programs early almost always say they would do it sooner next time.

Those who don’t almost always wish they had done it while they still had options.

By the time most organisations feel the need for independent review, they are no longer reviewing a plan.

They are dealing with its consequences.

Telecoms will make this shift.

Some leaders are already making it – early, while they still have room to shape the outcome.

Others will make it later – when the program has already shaped it for them.

But if you don’t test the plan early, the program will test it for you.

By then, you’re not in control of the outcome.

You’re living with it.

About the author

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

You can call him on 0118 359 2444 or email david.hilliard@mentoreurope.com.