The desks are the easy part. Removalists are good at their job, and furniture arrives on the day you booked it. The office moves that go wrong almost never go wrong because of furniture. They go wrong because someone signed the lease in March, booked the removalist for June, and ordered the internet in May.
Relocations are among the more coordination-heavy projects we run, and the pattern is consistent enough to be useful. Two things in an office move have lead times you cannot compress, and everything else bends around them.
The internet and the phone numbers set your date
Not the removalist, not the fit-out, not the lease commencement. These two:
- The internet service. A business NBN connection commonly runs somewhere around two to six weeks depending on whether the building is already serviced. A fibre service into a CBD tenancy can take longer again where new lead-in cabling has to be run or building management has to approve the work. New buildings and recent fit-outs are the least predictable of all.
- The phone numbers. A simple port of a single number often completes inside a week. A complex port, meaning a number range, a 1300 or 1800 number, or anything sitting behind a PBX, can take several weeks. Ports get delayed by mismatched account details, contracts still running, and services quietly attached to the line, so the paperwork needs to be right the first time.
Both are ordered from third parties who do not care about your move date. Order them the week the lease is signed. Everything else in the move can be compressed if it has to be. These two cannot.
A timeline that actually works
Twelve weeks is comfortable for a typical small or medium office. Larger or multi-site moves need longer.
- Twelve weeks out. Inspect the new premises with your IT provider present, not just the agent. Order the internet service. Start the number porting paperwork.
- Eight weeks out. Build the asset register. Decide what moves, what gets replaced and what gets retired. Design the comms room and confirm the cabling and patching required.
- Four weeks out. Get activation dates confirmed in writing. Book the cutover window. Order any new hardware, allowing for supply lead times rather than assuming stock.
- Move week. Run both sites live where you can. Verify a backup before anything is unplugged.
- The week after. Decommission the old site, cancel the old services, and confirm the final invoices actually stop.
That last line matters more than it sounds. Cancelled services that were never really cancelled are one of the most common costs carried for months after a move.
Look at the comms room before you sign the lease
Agents show you the floor plate, the natural light and the end-of-trip facilities. Nobody walks you into the comms cupboard. It is worth insisting, because what you find there is either included in your rent or it is a variation you pay for later.
Check rack space, dedicated power circuits, cooling, the condition of the existing cabling and patching, where the carrier lead-in physically enters the building, and who holds access to the room. A tenancy with no cooling in the comms room is not a deal breaker. Discovering it four weeks before you move, when the fit-out is already priced, is a much more expensive conversation than raising it during the inspection.
Run two connections, not one
The single cheapest piece of insurance in any relocation is a period of overlap where the old site and the new site are both live. It feels wasteful to pay for two connections for a fortnight. It is far less wasteful than a Friday cutover with no way back, discovered on Monday morning by everyone in the business at once.
Overlap also lets you move in stages. Get the network, the internet and the phones stable in the new premises while the old site still works, then move people. Staging a move is the same discipline as staging any other project, and it is the reason relocation budgets hold or blow out.
The things that get forgotten
The servers and the laptops are on everyone's list. These are the ones that surface at 4pm on move day:
- The alarm panel and the EFTPOS terminal, which may still sit on an old analogue line nobody has thought about in years.
- Door access systems and CCTV, which are usually somebody else's contract entirely.
- Multifunction printers, with their own service agreements, static addresses and scan-to-folder settings.
- Anything licensed to a fixed address, a MAC address or a site, which will need reissuing rather than replugging.
- Backups. Confirm a verified restore before equipment is disconnected, not after it arrives.
- Your business address itself, on the website, invoices, email signatures and your Google Business Profile. Inconsistent address details across the web quietly hurt your local search visibility, and it is easy to fix on the day and impossible to remember six months later.
- Who physically holds keys and access to the comms room at the new site on move day, including after hours.
One person has to own it
A relocation has a removalist, a landlord, a fit-out contractor, a cabler, a carrier, a phone provider and an IT provider, all working to one date that will not move. Most problems in a move trace back to two parties each assuming the other one had booked something. When one person owns the sequence and holds the master schedule, that failure mode largely disappears.
Order the internet before you book the removalist.
Connections and number ports are the only parts of an office move you cannot rush, so they set the date and everything else works backwards from them. Inspect the comms room before you sign, overlap the two sites through the cutover, and give one person the master schedule. Furniture is the easy part.
If you have signed a lease, or you are about to, the useful time to talk is now rather than a month out. We handle the IT side of relocations end to end, from the site inspection and the network and cabling design through to phone system and number porting, hardware, and people on the ground on move day. Bring us in before the removalist is booked and the date takes care of itself.