The background to your move issues has already been detailed here -
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,129374.msg1125399.html#msg1125399 - by PlusNET staff.
Given that the information detail was provided on your support ticket community members are not privy to the reasons in your circumstances, however "delays" can occur for a whole variety of issues, some caused by the acquiring provider, some by the loosing provider, some by the infrastructure holder BTOR / BTw whilst others are dictated by the industry regulator Ofcom.
In the above thread you were advised that the 5 days applies to processing the order, however given Ofcom rules it could never ever apply to a phone line move. Industry regulations intended to stop phone line slamming (moving phone lines between suppliers where a subscriber has not intentionally requested a move) means that even in ideal circumstances, 10 working days is the quickest a phone line can be moved.
It is not unknown for a loosing provider to simply cancel a migration request, thereby introducing delay into the process and retaining the subscriber into another billing period.
Issues (faults) with BTOR / BTw's systems not correctly processing orders (for numerous reasons) AND not advising the ordering CP / ISP that there is an issue are legion. Unfortunately inter-organisational business systems tend to be implemented to work "to specification" that is they expect things to work as intended with the consequence that (in this case) orders can be left waiting for the correct update forever until manual intervention is initiated. In this scenario there is another nasty twist arising from industry "safe guards" - the broadband migration authorisation code (MAC) issued by the loosing provider has a 30 shelf life, can be used just once and not until those 30 days have expired can a replacement be issued. If BT systems screw-up as described above, though the MAC is consider used, a replacement cannot be acquired until the end of the 30 day period and there is nothing which the loosing or acquiring ISP can do to circumvent the BTOR / BTw systems / rules.
PlusNet's systems are not without fault either and their operators are humans, who we are reminded do make mistakes from time to time!
One should also not forget that information provided by customers can also lead to delays - especially variations in addresses or (as I did once) transposition of digits in the phone number.
Whilst delay is frustrating not all causes of delay are within PN's governance / control, even when the ordering process is executed perfectly by all parties; BTOR engineering resources might not be capable of fulfilling the requested dates for a multitude of operational reasons. Such failures impact all ISPs alike.
For the bits which PN do control we've been advised that the new ordering system will fix a lot of the pre-order and order failure issues - at the back end of 2013 this was scheduled to be rolled out in early spring 2014, it's now late summer 2014 and implementation forecasts have not been updated. This is clearly a bigger task than originally anticipated, which frankly should have been expected. There is nothing more difficult (and indeed frustrating) than making one computer system defensive of another's out-of-specification-failures. I have encountered this on many projects across numerous industry sectors - the man in the middle (this case BTOR / BTw) will never admit that they are wrong. Indeed on my last project the middle man said "We've specified the messages you can get and how to reply to them; if you get other messages or don't get the response or format you expect, then that's your problem to handle".
Given the clear impact the issues arising from this process has on customer satisfaction, one wonders why the CEO has not directed that tactical controls (daily reporting processes) be implemented to identify those cases where failure in BTOR / BTw order management systems is causing PN customer orders to not progress as expected. Then to apply manual intervention and senior management review with the supplier. One can only surmise that might be because he does not want to embarrass his BT management colleges in other BT divisions.
To improve end user satisfaction right across the piece PN, needs to achieve better management of its suppliers - BTOR / BTw / telephony / call reporting / load balancers - to name but a few vendor related issues mention across the forums this week. The biggest problem suppliers (the first two) impact all ISPs and are a law unto themselves. Not even Ofcom set up - by the British Government - to regulate their operation can dictate their performance standards without approval from the EU. The whole regulatory model is broken, so it is unsurprising that at times the end to end service provision fails to meet PN customer's demanding expectations.
Superusers are not staff, but they do have a direct line of communication into the business in order to raise issues, concerns and feedback from the community.
