IT Relocations
How to Plan an Office Move
Office IT Relocations can be a complex manoeuvre because of the desire to maintain your regular day-to-day activities while avoiding any major business disruptions. Many people view the hard part of planning an office move or office relocation as finding a new space and then outsourcing to the moving company, but things are much more complex than that when you take all the IT requirements into account.
IT Relocation & Office Moves – The Procedure
As one would expect, the absolute key to a successful office move is planning far in advance. A team needs to be assembled to determine the key dates of the move, as well as distributing the relocation budget.
There are various tasks that must be completed, such as booking the movers, disposing of old equipment, and notifying your customers of the move. A larger team is helpful for thinking of these contingencies, although you may wish to use a relocation consultant who has been through this before.
Your Business Relocation Continuity Plan
IT relocations can be executed much more smoothly if you have a proper business continuity plan that details how your voice and data services are going to be transferred over. You should have a plan for how you can plan IT upgrades at the time of moving at this point.
The Office Relocation plan you put together will detail how your data and important documents are backed up and stored off site (in case of emergency).
The inventory list you will have prepared as part of your checklist above will be helpful both with dealing with the movers and reassembling your office when your equipment reaches the new office.
Facilitating Your IT Relocation
IT relocations & office moves are a difficult to pull off without previous experience. There are invariably going to be unforeseen problems, but you need to be ready to solve them at a moment’s notice so as to avoid missing out on revenue.
The most frequent problem during office relocations is to do with the IT systems, which is why you should assemble a team who is devoted to planning and managing the way new systems will be implemented over the course of your office relocation.
The key to successful office IT relocation is in going through a checklist of all the things that could possibly go wrong, and mitigating the risks early on. Here are several questions to ask yourself:
- Do we have a relocation business continuity plan?
- Have we contacted all our Internet Service Providers regarding this move?
- Have we performed an audit and inventory of all our current systems?
- Do we need to upgrade any of our systems or equipment in the foreseeable future?
By properly assessing what you have and what you need, it is possible to turn your office move into a net benefit for everyone. Relocating your old telecoms system can be just as difficult (or more difficult) than moving to a new one.
Additionally, if you are planning on recruiting or onboarding new staff as part of your office move, you will have a whole new set of variables to cope with. This is why it is recommended that any upgrades you would be considering over the next 2-3 years be executed during a move.This sort of strong continuity should be your overarching goal throughout the whole move. However there is also a real opportunity to plan for the future and make changes that will set you up for success over the long-term.