The Office-Move IT Relocation Checklist

The lease is signed, the new place looks great, and someone has booked the removal van for a Friday so you “only lose the weekend.” Then, three days before, you find out the broadband at the new office won’t be live for another month. Now the whole team is turning up Monday to a building with no internet, no phones and no way to log in.

It happens more than you’d think. Around Streatham, Croydon and out into Surrey, the businesses that move well aren’t the ones with the biggest budget — they’re the ones who treated the IT as its own project, started early, and had a proper plan for the day itself. The physical move is the easy part. Getting your systems to wake up in a new building, ready to work, is where moves quietly go wrong.

Here’s how to plan it so Monday morning is boring, in the best possible way.

Start with the one thing that has a long lead time

Almost everything about a move is flexible. Your internet connection is not. A new business broadband or fibre line can take six to eight weeks to install, and if the building needs new cabling to the comms room, longer still. This is the item that decides your real move date, so order it the day the lease is signed and build everything else around it.

While you’re at it, ask the landlord or agent two questions: what connectivity already reaches the building, and where’s the comms cabinet? A unit that’s had a business tenant before may already have fibre and structured cabling in place. An empty shell might need both — which is a cost and a timeline you want to know about now, not the week before.

Map what you actually have

Before you can move your IT, you need to know what it is. Walk round the current office and list it honestly: how many desks, how many staff, what’s plugged into the network, and whether you still run a physical server or you’re mostly in the cloud already.

That inventory does two jobs. It tells you what has to physically travel, and it flags anything worth changing while you’ve got the chance. A move is the ideal moment to retire the ageing server nobody wants to touch, or to sort out the Wi-Fi that never quite reached the back office. It’s far easier to design a clean network setup for the new space than to recreate a tangle you’ve outgrown.

Design the new office before you’re standing in it

The best time to plan where everything goes is before the furniture arrives. Decide where the comms cabinet lives, where the wireless access points need to sit for full coverage, and how many network points each area needs. Open-plan spaces, thick Victorian walls and awkward mezzanines all affect where business Wi-Fi and networking actually works — and it’s a lot cheaper to run a cable before the desks are in than after.

Get this on paper early and the install day becomes a case of following the plan, not improvising with a floor full of boxes.

The IT relocation checklist

Work through these in roughly this order:

• As soon as the lease is signed: order broadband or fibre for the new site. Check the phone system will move — cloud or VoIP numbers travel with you; older lines need porting, which takes lead time.
• 6–8 weeks out: confirm the cabling and comms room are ready. Design the network and Wi-Fi layout. Decide what’s moving, what’s being replaced, and what’s shifting to the cloud.
• 3–4 weeks out: take a full, tested backup of everything before anything is unplugged — this is your safety net if hardware doesn’t survive the trip. Book the install and set your go-live date.
• 1 week out: label every cable and device. Confirm the new internet line is live and tested. Brief the team on what Monday will look like and who to call.
• Move day: power down and disconnect in a known order. Set up and test the network, internet and phones first — everything else depends on them.
• Go-live morning: check every workstation logs in, printers are found, email and shared files work, and phones ring. Fix the small snags while someone’s on site, not after they’ve left.

Don’t unplug anything without a backup

The one rule that saves moves: take a full, tested backup before a single cable comes out. Hard drives don’t love being switched off, jostled in a van and switched on somewhere colder. Most of the time everything’s fine. Occasionally a machine that ran for years decides the move is where it stops. A current backup turns that from a disaster into an inconvenience.

The soft landing

A good move is invisible to your customers. Nobody emails to say “well done, your systems stayed up” — they only notice when they don’t. Planning the IT as its own workstream, with the internet ordered first and the day itself rehearsed on paper, is what buys you that quiet Monday.

If you’ve got a move coming up and you’d rather not gamble on the broadband turning up in time, we’re happy to help you plan it — or handle the whole relocation as part of your managed IT support. Either way, the goal is the same: a new office where everything just works when your team walks in.