Office Relocations – What NOT to do
We’ve been helping our clients with office relocations non-stop since 2014, and during that time we’ve seen it all. Based on our experience, we’d like to present our top six mistakes to avoid when moving office.
1. Setting impossible deadlines
Two to three months of lead time is ideal for most office moves to give everyone plenty of time to get prepared and ensure everything happens smoothly.
We love it when a client gets in touch with us at least 8-12 weeks before their move, as it means we have enough time to plan and help provide the best possible moving experience for them
2. Leaving internet, phone & communications to the last minute
You don’t want to end up stuck without phone, internet or emails at any point during a relocation, as these are most likely essential for you to conduct business. By planning ahead, stopgap measures can be put in place to ensure a seamless transition and minimise interruptions to your business. Then, with enough time on the other end to make sure your communications work, you can be ready to go before the entire office moves. Early planning also means you can factor your communications and necessary connections into your budget, reducing any nasty last-minute bill shocks.
3. Throwing old IT gear in the bin
While throwing old PCs in the bin or leaving them in your old office may seem like an easy way to get rid of them, this is dangerous for both the environment and your privacy.
It’s essential that you have your data securely destroyed before disposing of your old hardware, as you don’t want sensitive information such as financials and passwords ending up in the wrong hands. It is also important to recycle old hardware, but not just in your yellow lid bin! There are many chemicals and elements in computer parts that aren’t good for the environment, and which can often be recycled and reused instead of just sitting in landfill.
We can help with both secure data removal and hardware recycling, so if you’re interested in this be sure to give us a shout and we can discuss the best options for you.
4. Having too many people involved the process
We’re sure you’ve heard the saying about too many cooks in the kitchen – but did you know that the same concept also applies to office relocations? Having too many people often means too many approvals through the hierarchy, resulting in the process becoming slow and inefficient. Try to streamline this by having only essential staff involved in the process.
5. Leaving it all to one person
While you want to reduce your office move team to key staff, you also don’t want to leave it all to one person – an office move can be a huge job! Delegate tasks where necessary to the appropriate people, and try to outsource where possible, with a central coordinator overseeing it all. This also lowers the risk of things slipping through the cracks along the way.
6. Having unrealistic expectations
Whether you’re looking at time frames, budgets or the physical limits of what can be achieved in a day, don’t expect miracles! Plenty of planning can make unrealistic expectations less likely, and a more practical approach will overall lead to a less stressful, more successful move for you and your team.
Are you preparing for an upcoming relocation? Don’t know where to begin when it comes to moving your IT, or looking for some specific advice? We’re here to help and would love to chat with you. Get in touch with us at info@aitsys.com.au or 1300 228 480.
Video Transcript
G’day everyone, Steve from activIT systems with the last video in our office relocation series.
This one’s all about the things you should not do when planning or undertaking a relocation.One of the really big things which we should not do is set impossible deadlines! We’ve had a few clients over the journey of the last 10 years or so come to us and say “we’re about to move office and our lease expires in 2 weeks and we want everything to be done and magically move into the new space”. It just does not happen that fast, there’s a lot of things that have to be done in advance – you can check out our previous videos for more information. The impossible deadline will set a lot of stress among yourself and your team, and you’ve got a lot of other tradies and other people needed to get things to happen like removalists, IT companies and phone system companies and who just can’t get things happening in that kind of time frame. You need at least a 2-3 month window from start to finish, more if you can afford it.
The next one is don’t leave phone and internet communications options to the last minute
They’re probably one of the first things you want to have a think about and get the professionals engaged for, even if it’s just on a consultation basis to say we want to move to this location, what are the internet options here, what do we need to do with phones over here, can we pick our phone system up and move it across – you may or may not be able to do this. Going through all these things at the start is very advantageous because it sets the groundwork for things like your budget, how you are going to keep your operations up when you’re moving, and basically make sure that when you get to the new spot you are up and running. Sometimes internet takes a long time to get set up, especially such as a fibre-optic internet connection, and we’ve had clients in the past who just haven’t had enough time for their relocation and have ended up running off a 4G system for a couple of weeks – and if you’ve ever been on 4G, or had excess data usage charges on your mobile phone, you know that’s pretty pricey and adds up pretty fast.
Now the last one, which we see a lot, is when people are moving office they try not to take everything with them and one of the things which gets left behind is old IT gear. Our biggest advice here is don’t chuck it in the bin, especially if it’s old PCs, because you’re probably going to have data floating around on those hard drives – it’s very easy to get the data securely destroyed, you can give us a call or other IT professionals and we are able to consult surrounding this and basically make sure that if you’re going to get rid of this gear, you’re not letting out confidential information and that you aren’t breaching any privacy laws etc.
The other thing is if you’ve just got this old monitor or printer or something if you go chuck that in the bin it’s just going to end up in landfill. There’s a lot of companies out there which will do recycling of IT components and they’ll strip all the pieces out and make sure that the heavy metals like mercury, for example, don’t end up in the ecosystem. This is a real big issue at the moment is there’s a lot of waste and things like cheap printers and similar are sold very cheaply, and quite often it’s cheaper just to buy a new one than to buy toner or cartridges. So they’re assembled, they build a big pile of this IT junk, it doesn’t make sense to move it with you but you can easily get it recycled. It does cost a few dollars, but you’re doing the right thing for the environment as well so definitely do that. If you need any advice feel free to give us a call, otherwise Google IT hardware recycling and there’s plenty of companies that do it.
That’s pretty much it in terms of this last video in the relocation series, I would recommend you check out the other two we’ve done, check our Facebook feed and YouTube and also our website, it’s all listed on there.
If you need help planning your relocation or facilitating it, by all means, give us a call, and we’d love to help.
Thank you!
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