An office move has a hard date and no rollback. Furniture arrives, the lease on the old space ends, and staff show up on Monday expecting Wi-Fi, printers and phones. Every IT problem not solved in advance becomes an outage with an audience.
The checklist below is ordered by lead time. The items at the top take months and cannot be rushed. The items at the bottom take a weekend. Start early on the first group and the last group becomes routine.
Months ahead: the circuit and the space
Order the internet circuit first. Business fiber and dedicated circuits routinely take many weeks from order to a live handoff, and construction delays are common. Order two if the business cannot tolerate downtime: a primary and a cheaper backup from a different provider. Ask the landlord which providers already serve the building.
At the same time, walk the new space with the architect's plan and mark where the network closet goes, where cable drops land, and where access points mount. The closet needs power on its own circuit, cooling, and a lockable door. Quote the cable drops now, while walls are still open.
- Primary and backup internet ordered, with install dates in writing
- Closet location agreed: power, cooling, lock, rack or wall cabinet
- Cable drop count per room, with spares, on a marked plan
- Access point locations from a predictive survey or a walk with a test AP
- Phone system decision: keep the provider, port numbers, or move to a new platform
Weeks ahead: equipment, addressing and staging
Decide what moves and what gets replaced. A move is the cheapest time to retire the old firewall, because the labor is already scheduled. Order replacements early enough to stage them on a bench with the new site's configuration and the new public addresses from the ISP.
Plan the addressing. If the new site needs a new subnet, update DHCP scopes, VPN configurations, firewall rules and anything hard-coded to the old range. Keep the same internal addressing if you can. Update DNS records, the mail filter's allowed sender addresses, any vendor IP allowlists, and the SPF record if mail flows from the office.
- List every device at the old site and mark it: move, replace, or dispose
- Stage new network equipment with the new site config and test on the bench
- Write the list of places the public IP appears and schedule each change
- Confirm the phone number port date and the call routing during the gap
- Book the moving company for IT equipment separately, with insurance and a named contact
Move weekend: the order of operations
Before the move, take a full backup of every server and verify it. Photograph every rack and every cable before anything is unplugged. Bag and label cables per device. Servers travel padded in their own vehicle, not in the truck with the desks.
At the new site the order is: power and UPS, then the ISP handoff and firewall, then the core switch and patch panel, then servers, then Wi-Fi, then printers and phones. Test at each layer before moving to the next. A laptop on the firewall's LAN port proves the internet before you debug the switch.
- Verified backups and rack photos taken before anything moves
- Power and UPS live in the closet, ISP handoff confirmed with a laptop
- Firewall online with the new public address, VPN back to other sites up
- Core switch and patch panel connected, VLANs verified on a test port
- Servers racked and booted, services checked from a workstation
- Wi-Fi broadcasting, printers reachable, phones registered
The first Monday and the week after
Have a technician on site before the first person arrives, with spare cables, a label maker, and the list of who sits where. Walk every desk: dock, monitors, network, phone. The first hour of tickets will be docks not powered and monitors on the wrong input. Fix them at the desk rather than through the queue.
During the week, watch for the slower problems: a vendor whose allowlist still has the old IP, a scanner that emails through an SMTP relay that now rejects the new address, a scheduled backup that ran to a target at the old site. Keep the old site's circuit live for a short overlap if the contract allows. Then update the documentation so the old address and closet are gone from the runbooks.
- Technician on site early with spares and the seating plan
- Every desk walked and tested before the user sits down
- Vendor allowlists, SMTP relays and backup targets re-checked after the first day
- Old site circuit kept live briefly for anything forgotten
- Site documentation rewritten for the new address, closet and cabling
Frequently asked questions
How far ahead should we start planning the IT side of a move?
As soon as the lease is signed, and earlier if you can influence the building choice. Internet delivery is the long pole, and the closet location is much cheaper to get right before the fit-out starts.
Should we move servers or use the move to go to the cloud?
If a cloud migration was already on the roadmap, doing it before the move removes the riskiest part of the weekend. If it was not, do not bundle a migration into a move; one hard-dated project at a time.
What about the phone system?
Confirm the number port date in writing and set call forwarding during any gap. If the system is cloud-based, the phones only need power and internet at the new site. If it is on-premises, treat the PBX as a server in the move plan.
Takeaway
Order the circuits and plan the closet months ahead, stage new equipment weeks ahead, and bring the new site up layer by layer on the weekend with a test at each step. Be at the desks before staff arrive on Monday and chase the slow problems through the week. The move is a fixed date; the only variable is how much of the work you finished before it.