In this chapter we have learnt that regulation is mainly focused on market failure and aims to deliver benefits to citizens and consumers. However, the emphasis and priorities of regulation change over time, as competition develops. Going forward, regulation will focus on encouraging investment in new networks; ensuring that consumers benefit from innovation and convergence; and that new economic bottlenecks do not develop. Finally, it is clear that regulation will continue to be a very important part of the commercial environment for telecommunications companies and the ICT industry generally.

In this chapter we first looked at the formal, external financial accounts of a business - how they are prepared and what they mean. We then looked at how the accounts might be analysed to determine how well the company is managed today and what its future prospects might be. Many stakeholders are interested in such matters, but they are particularly relevant to current and potential investors i.e. to the stock market. The focus then shifted to the internal company aspects of finance, starting with financial and business planning; the challenges associated with capital planning; and the authorisation of capital expenditure. Finally we explored the development and purpose of business cases and gave particular attention to investment appraisal and the assessment and management of risk. Our aim here was not to provide a comprehensive textbook explanation of financial accounts, or to replace your friendly accountant! It was to give a level of financial understanding and awareness appropriate to help non-financial managers in the ICT industry operate more successfully in whatever field of endeavour they choose to pursue.

Building a telecommunications network incurs significant capital investment which takes many years of running revenue-earning services to recover. We saw in Chapter 5 how the infrastructure assets - optical fibre cables, exchanges, cell sites, routers, etc. - have economic lives ranging from 2 to 25 years. The challenge for a Telco is to build the network with sufficient capacity and geographical coverage to carry the predicted levels of traffic at the appropriate quality of service, recognising the cost and longevity of the infrastructure and the possible difficulties in adjusting the configuration to meet changing requirements. This challenge has become progressively more difficult since the 1990s with the opening up of competition, the vast expansion of data networking and the Internet, and the huge explosion of application providers (e.g. OTT), leading to less predictability in the market and more rapid technology churn. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the principles of planning a telecommunications network in the most efficient way. We also consider how to determine the strategy for the networks enhancement and growth that meets the challenge. We begin our consideration of network strategy and planning by identifying its links to the various levels of business planning within a Telco. In the next section we see how the business objectives and strategy set the framework for the network strategy, and how this directs the planning of the network. (Of course, this relationship may at times be somewhat circular in that the network capabilities can also influence the business objectives.) The topic of network planning is first described as a set of key principles and then the planning approach, based on the economic rules introduced in Chapter 5, for the main parts of a telecommunications network are discussed. We then look at the planning principles for creating a major transformation of the network technology and structure. Finally, we consider one of the most important outputs from the network planning process in a Telco, which is the list of equipment that needs to be purchased and installed - i.e. the capital investment programme for the network.

In this chapter we have examined the wide-ranging role of product management, covering the full life cycle of the product. In particular, the important aspects of deriving product costs and the various strategies for pricing were identified. We also considered the difficult, but vital, task of forecasting the customer demand and the associated revenues, noting that different techniques were required depending on the availability of historical sales data. The challenge of managing a successful product launch was highlighted, noting the consequences for a Telco when the launch is mismanaged. Finally, the advantages of managing a set of products as a coherent portfolio were described, together with the importance of understanding how innovation can support this objective.

In this chapter we have considered the principles of managing people in the workplace, recognising that they represent one of the most important assets for all types of companies. We then addressed the objectives of organisation design, and how the control and communication between the separate parts of the organisation will differ with the various types of structure. In particular, we considered how functional, divisional, and geographic structures apply to ICT companies. Finally, we have looked at the role of HR management within a company, noting that the HR role is actually dispersed across all managers and supervisors within the organisation, generally with the HR team taking the central drive and advisory role.