Many business people, unless they’re IT literate, often break out in a cold sweat of apprehension at the thought of moving their technology from one office to another.
Now that’s not entirely irrational because there have been some disasters in this domain, some of which have actually made the news. Yet it really doesn’t have to be a problem and the vast majority of such moves go forward smoothly.
However, that’s not by accident. So, although we’re relocation specialists not IT gurus, here are a few top tips:
- Get an IT expert in relocations in to help assess your installation and plan for its removal. If you have one in-house fine. If not, be prepared to spend some money on this – it’ll be small potatoes in the scheme of things and insignificant when measured against the costs of a potential IT debacle in your new premises on day-1.
- Put someone ‘heavyweight’ in charge of making sure that the IT plan is part of the overall relocation plan and that together they’re tightly managed as an integrated whole. It’s not unknown to find companies that have two entirely separate plans (one for IT) and the result can be chaos.
- If you can, try to get your IT kit set up in the new location as the first step and tested thoroughly. It takes a little doing (and perhaps some weekend working) but it’s far easier getting the IT right when there aren’t desks, copiers, chairs and pot plants in the way making access to cables, servers and routers difficult etc.
- Make sure you have full backups of all your data right up until the last second you ‘switch off’ your old site. You should be doing this anyway but in the context of an office relocation, it’s really essential because your backups might be all that stand between you and your business being unable to function if something goes wrong.