NBN CEO Mike Quigley walks the political plank Pushed or jumped? For departing National Broadband Network Co chief executive Mike Quigley, it would have been both. His two key patrons were gone. NBN chairman Harrison Young was replaced by Siobhan McKenna in March, and Kevin Rudd's coup last month sent former Communications Minister Steve Conroy to the back benches. A tenure ends ... The NBN itself is under pressure over a delayed rollout, and its future is unclear. It should have a continuing role in a Coalition government's less ambitious patchwork broadband rollout, in transit links between cities, greenfields rollouts to new suburbs, satellite and fixed wireless services. It also has written large long-term contracts that a Coalition government would honour. Exactly what the NBN would look like under a Coalition government is unclear, however, and Quigley knew that that in any event he would not lead a Coalition government-controlled NBN. He was too closely associated with the full-blown fibre to the home rollout that Conroy created, and the politics that surrounded it. McKenna knew it too. As chairman it was her job to organise succession, and she has been doing so: Quigley said today that the board agreed that it was time for him to leave. After coming out of retirement from senior roles in the Alcatel group to take the chief executive role 4 years ago, Quigley leaves with a mixed record. He helped forge the agreement with Telstra that made the project physically possible, almost completed negotiations with the ACCC to create a workable access regime for the company and its wholesale telco customers. He created the network's architecture, coping with political interference that increased the complexity and cost of the project in the process, by adding to the number of network connection points, for example. And he also created a modular rollout plan that has already halved NBN's connection costs per premise as NBN repeats and refines its processes. Quigley said on Friday that the NBN's recent announcement that it had reached revised, downgraded targets for network coverage cleared the way for him to stand aside. There are however continuing concerns that NBN does not have sufficient project management skills or sub-contracted construction resources to deliver the massive project that Labor launched on time and on budget. With the network design done and the key agreements with Telstra and others in the bag, project management becomes the key skill for the person who takes over. Opposition communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull is right that the appointment surely cannot be made before the election result is known, however (Quigley says he will serve until the handover occurs). The chief executive's brief is heavily contingent on the election outcome.