How to avoid poorly planned office relocations

Office relocations are inevitable, especially for growing businesses. Whether you’re transferring to a bigger office or relocating to the other side of the city, moving offices is equal parts exciting and stressful. However, it isn’t as simple as boxing up your stuff and moving to another location. Without proper planning, your business could experience downtime or inefficiency. In order to avoid poorly planned office relocations, you must know the key risk areas when moving offices and how to properly address them.

Here are some things to consider during a critical office move.

Planning and management

As with most endeavors, proper planning and management ensure a smooth and successful relocation. Having a concrete plan helps you define the full scope of your move and identify areas that could affect employee productivity and cause business downtime. Meanwhile, assigning a project manager or a go-to person establishes a single point of communication and overall accountability. People can reach out to them if they have a concern, change, or plan that will affect the office move. The right plan will help you set goals and objectives as well as meet deadlines easily.

Work quality

Because moving offices is a change in the norm, some employees might find it hard to pursue business as usual. Even if an organization is backed by an accreditation like ISO 9001 — which means a business consistently provides and improves products and services that meet customer and regulatory requirements — work quality can decline due to a lack of process and planning. This can lead to longer office relocation time or costs ballooning.

Following documented processes is a proven way to maintain good work quality. Having a defined, documented, and communicated set of processes, flow diagrams, and checklists can ensure that tasks are done correctly and items aren’t overlooked.

Security

With all the hustle and bustle in a relocation, it’s not unusual to bypass certain processes and take shortcuts. However, these make your business susceptible to threats, loss, and compromise to data, staff, and physical equipment. You’ll need to strictly implement, manage, and monitor the security of your business during the move.

To ensure relocation security, have certain people manage and account for physical equipment and virtual data. If you don’t have anyone in-house, you can seek help from a managed services provider to safely move your IT infrastructure. Make sure to brief the entire team about the risks, security implications, and preventive actions they can take during the move to ensure the security of the business’s premises and systems.

Communication

The lack of clear communications can be detrimental when moving offices. For instance, your staff might presume that someone already has a particular task covered, which can cause disorganization and delays. It pays to have a thorough and documented communication plan for how your team communicates among one another regarding office move progress, tasks, and issues. To make sure nobody drops the ball, use technology to aid and streamline communication. For instance, you can utilize email, instant messaging, or web collaboration tools to coordinate your team throughout a hectic office move.

Cloud solutions

The logistics of moving office locations is already complex — it’s 10 times harder if your business has an on-site IT infrastructure. Not only will you juggle people, space, and equipment, but you’ll also have to ensure the careful management of the migration of your data. Poorly planned migrations can cause downtime and wreak havoc on the productivity and revenue of your business.

Adopting cloud solutions is ideal for businesses that want to keep working and continue generating revenue during an office move. It’s inexpensive and doesn’t require any in-house management of physical servers and storage systems. Utilizing cloud-based technologies such as cloud-hosted desktops, telecommunications, and data sharing applications allows your business to transition smoothly, as it won’t involve transporting bulky equipment carrying sensitive data.

There’s certainly a long list of variables to be considered when moving offices, but cloud service providers like Safebit Solutions offer managed migration plans that can ensure smooth technology relocations and save your business time and money.

We at Safebit Solutions are prepared to perform IT infrastructure relocations of all scopes and sizes while ensuring a minimal amount of downtime. Our team of experts can assist with moving IT equipment as well as consolidating multiple locations or adding new locations. We can also help with asset inventory and disposal. To know more about our technology office relocation services, call us today.