The Building Changes; the Dependencies Do Not: An IT Runbook for UK Office Moves

An office move is usually managed as a property project with an IT problem attached. In practice it is an IT project with a lease deadline attached, and the deadline does not move. What makes moves fail is rarely the technology itself. It is the discovery, on the first morning in the new building, that the card terminal needs a network point nobody ordered, that the main number still rings in a building you no longer occupy, or that the circuit was ordered eight weeks ago and is now scheduled for installation in eleven weeks' time.

The runbook below is written for a UK SME of perhaps fifteen to two hundred staff, without a full-time IT department. It assumes a supplier or managed service provider exists, and that someone internally is accountable.

Why moves fail in the same three places

First, broadband lead time exceeding the lease term. Second, a dependency discovered on the day rather than before it. Third, the old site being disconnected before the new one has been proven. Every item below exists to close one of those three gaps.

Twenty to sixteen weeks out: the paper stage

Get the floor plan before you get quotes. You need desk positions, the location of the comms room or riser, and a view of how cable will reach each desk. Ask the landlord or managing agent a short set of questions in writing: which carrier already serves the building, whether fibre is present and where it terminates, whether there is a wayleave and who controls it, whether you may access the riser, whether there is rack space in a shared comms room, and whether any building-provided internet may be used.

Treat building-provided Wi-Fi as a convenience, never as the primary connection for a business that depends on it.

Then order connectivity. A new Ethernet or leased line circuit from Openreach frequently takes between forty and ninety working days, and can take longer where construction work is required. FTTP or SoGEA variants are typically faster but must be checked against the exact postcode and the exact unit — availability at the building is not availability at your floor. Order the primary and the fallback at the same time, and budget for overlapping months during which you pay for both sites. That overlap is not waste; it is insurance.

Give notice on the old circuits only after the new ones have passed acceptance testing, and diarise it. Providers commonly require thirty to ninety days.

Fifteen to twelve weeks out: cabling and the comms room

Commission a structured cabling survey and insist on certification and a patch schedule. Confirm the number of outlets per desk, floor boxes versus dado trunking, routes and fire stopping in risers, power in the comms room, whether a UPS is warranted, cooling, physical security, rack space and earthing. Confirm what the landlord permits in terms of drilling and out-of-hours access.

If wireless matters — and it usually does — arrange a survey in the empty building rather than after the furniture arrives. It will not be perfect, but it will be far better than guessing.

Book the removal firm and the building's loading bay and lift now. In city centres, check whether parking suspensions or permits are needed.

Eleven to eight weeks out: the things that ring

Inventory every number and every line, not just the main switchboard. That means DDIs, the fax if one survives, the door entry system, the lift emergency line, the intruder alarm signalling line, the card terminal connection and the franking machine.

For VoIP, confirm the provider supports the new site, establish whether numbers port or simply re-register, and update the emergency address registration so that 999 and 112 calls present the correct location. This is a regulatory obligation as well as a practical one, and it is routinely forgotten. For anything still on analogue or ISDN, assume nothing and order early; legacy services are being withdrawn across the UK and lead times are not always what the website suggests.

Also of this stage: door access control, CCTV and its retention settings, alarm monitoring, the intercom and visitor sign-in, and any equipment leased from a supplier that is tied to a specific address.

Seven to four weeks out: the dependencies nobody listed

Make a list of everything pinned to an IP address, a MAC address, a certificate or a hostname. This is where most of the hidden work sits.

• New site IP ranges and static addressing; updated site-to-site VPNs and firewall rules.
• Any third party that allowlists your office IP — banks, HMRC services, payment gateways, EDI partners, single sign-on providers.
• Certificates and DNS records, with TTLs lowered at least two weeks ahead if you host anything externally.
• Printers and multifunction devices: drivers, scan-to-email and scan-to-folder, and whether any legacy SMB settings need attention.
• Backups: is the hardware insured in transit, and when was the last successful restore test?
• Any server living in the comms room. Who can work while it is offline, and for how long?
• Time clocks, EPOS, door access software and anything else with a local component.

In parallel, work through the address changes: Royal Mail redirection, Companies House registered office, bank, HMRC, ICO registration, insurer, utilities, telecoms billing, and the online business listings and website contact page that customers will actually look at.

Three to two weeks out: the rehearsal

Walk the new site with the IT supplier and the cabling contractor. Test whatever can be tested on the new circuit. Print a page. Scan to email. Make an inbound and outbound call. Run a card payment over the new connection.

Produce a floor plan with outlet labels and a seating plan, and publish it. Label the patch panel. Assemble a labelled first-morning box: patch leads, a spare switch, a spare laptop, a 4G router for fallback, label tape, a printed network diagram and a contact list.

Move week

Two days before, confirm access arrangements, the cabling certificate and that the new circuit is live and tested. On removal day, label every device before it goes into the van and photograph the old comms room. Cutover should follow a fixed order: circuit, firewall, switch, wireless, servers, printers, telephony, then test. Do not decommission the old site's connectivity until the new site has passed acceptance.

The first morning acceptance test

One page, ticked by a named person: internet, Wi-Fi across the whole floor, printing, scanning, calls in and out, door access, alarm, card terminal, file access, the line-of-business application, email, VPN, a video call from a meeting room, and confirmation that last night's backup ran. Post a short "who to call" sheet at reception and in the kitchen.

The week after

Collect the remaining equipment from the old site, cancel or transfer circuits once the notice period you diarised has run, remove stale DNS records, update the asset register with new locations and serial numbers, and file the cabling certification alongside the signed acceptance checklist.

The runbook is the deliverable

None of this is exotic. It is a list, worked through in the right order, with the awkward dependencies surfaced while there is still time to order something. The firms that move well are not the ones with the most sophisticated networks. They are the ones that wrote the list in month five instead of discovering it in week one.