Office Relocation Without Losing a Working Day

The furniture is the easy part of an office move. The hard part is that on Monday morning people need to sit down, log in and work — and every hour they cannot is a real cost that dwarfs what you paid the movers.

Six weeks out

• Confirm the new premises handover date in writing, and add a buffer. Fit-out overruns are the norm, not the exception.
• Check the building's goods-lift hours and any restriction on weekend work. In commercial buildings this frequently dictates the entire schedule.
• Arrange internet and phone lines at the new address. This is the single longest lead-time item and the one that most often delays a move.
• Build an asset register — every desk, chair, monitor, machine, with a tag number.

Four weeks out

• Produce a seating plan for the new office. Without it, unloading has no destination and boxes end up in a heap.
• Label desks and zones in the new office to match the plan. Colour-coding beats numbering; people follow colours.
• Decide what is not moving. An office move is the best opportunity you will get to dispose of dead equipment and archive paper.
• Brief staff on what they pack themselves — personal desk contents — and what they do not touch.

Two weeks out

• Plan the IT cutover with your IT team or vendor: what shuts down when, what goes first, and what must be live before anyone arrives.
• Back up everything, then verify the backup restores. An untested backup is not a backup.
• Notify clients, suppliers, your bank, and update the address on your website, invoices and Google Business Profile.
• Arrange for confidential documents to be moved in sealed, tracked containers rather than open cartons.

The weekend of the move

The sequence that works:

1. Friday evening: systems shut down, IT equipment packed and labelled to the seating plan
2. Saturday morning: IT equipment and servers move first and are installed first
3. Saturday afternoon: furniture moves and is placed to plan
4. Sunday: IT tested workstation by workstation, network verified, printers and phones checked
5. Sunday evening: a walk-through against the asset register

Installing furniture before IT is the classic mistake. It means the IT team works around furniture and people, and the testing gets compressed into Sunday night.

Things that go wrong, and how to prevent them

• Cables not labelled. Photograph the back of every machine before unplugging. It takes ten minutes and saves hours.
• No power at the new desks. Verify socket positions against the seating plan before moving day, not on it.
• Server room not ready. Cooling and power for a server room are a fit-out item, not a moving item. Confirm they are live a week before.
• Nobody on site with authority. Someone who can make decisions needs to be at the new office throughout, not reachable by phone.

Monday morning

Have IT support physically present for the first half day, and expect a queue. Even a well-executed move produces a morning of small problems, and having someone there turns each one into five minutes rather than an unlogged ticket.