Why rollouts slip: readiness gates and the ninety-day lie

By the time an engineer is on site with staged, pre-imaged equipment, the work is routine — two hours, well-rehearsed, with a completion report. Programme risk lives almost entirely upstream of that moment.

Sites slip because power is not where the survey said, because the comms room is being used as storage, because nobody told the branch manager, or because the landlord needs six weeks' notice for out-of-hours access. None of these are IT problems, and all of them stop an installation.

A readiness gate is a small set of binary conditions that must be true before a site is scheduled. The value is not the checklist; it is that a site failing a gate becomes visible six weeks before its installation date instead of on the morning of it.

Programmes without gates do not slip less — they just find out later, when contingency has already been spent and the freeze period is closer.

Retail programmes face trading freezes, education faces term dates, finance faces reporting periods. Every one of these is known at planning stage and every one of them is routinely treated as something to catch up after.

Contingency spent before an immovable deadline is worth several times contingency held after it. Front-loading the run rate is unglamorous and it is the difference between finishing and explaining.