ISBN 1-883422-08-6

This is the definitive ‘how-to’ guide for anyone involved in office moves or data center moves. The book gives concise and clear instructions on how to plan the physical move, organise the people, manage the communications and move the computing services. All aspects are covered, from seating positions to data communications. The book is conversational and practical, rather than being a dry management checklist. The author is an experienced practitioner who has used the described methods in the real world.

The book is suitable for people with responsibility for IS/IT or Facilities, or anyone who is planning to relocate their office or business.

Your Move

If you have ever been at the receiving end of an office move where computers were involved, you will appreciate that they often have the same impact on productivity as a bomb. It is often a good idea to book your holiday to coincide with it.

It need not be like this.

If you are responsible for a move, or if you stand to get the blame when it goes wrong, this book is for you. This is the survivor's guide to moving people and computers around in modern office environments. This book is the condensed and clearly explained experience of moving the worst sorts of IS and office set-ups. The clearly explained planning points and the simple methods used will help you survive the madness.

This book covers the two basic scenarios: the office move involving desks, chairs and people, and the data center move involving computers and systems. This is not a technical guide: it is intended to be as useful for Building Services people as it is for IS people.

The actual instructions are in the form of a ten-point plan. You will doubtless have seen the usual business-guru management handbooks that dispense numbered plans for reorganizing your business. I hope that this one is different in that it has been tested under real conditions and is achievable!

There are three main players in any move: the Facilities or Building Services department; the IS Department; and the people being moved. Facilities will usually be responsible for the overall move and will cover relocation, desks, chairs and accommodation. The IS Department will be responsible for the telephones, computers and computer services.

In my experience the problems that can arise do so because these two players do not recognize each other's importance. To the IS Department, Facilities is all desks and chairs - the things that keep the computers off the floor. To Facilities, computers are bits of office equipment, like desks and chairs. Take them to a new place and they will keep working just like they did in the old place.

The people being moved add an extra complication to the situation. They will want a 'zipless move' - where everything happens overnight and there is no impact on their work. This is the ideal but it is often possible to gain support for major inconvenience, providing you handle these customers well.

Moving employees is expensive. According to the International Financial
Management Association, the average company moves 41% of its employees
every year, spending $1,000 per moved employee.

Source: Forbes, April 10, 1995

How it Begins

If you are lucky, your office move starts with a wild gleam in somebody's eye. This means that there is still time: no-one has started to pack removals crates yet. Tell the wild gleamer that it is a wonderful idea, but will need just a little planning. Give them a copy of this book. If you are really lucky they will read it and realize what 'just a little planning' really means. The problem is that you can't persuade fanatics with reasonable argument (and people with bright ideas about moving count as religious zealots). They will read this book and know that it is possible to move people and computers without major disruption. With their belief thus strengthened, you had better start planning in earnest.

Read this book through from the beginning and expend at least twice as much effort planning as doing. It pays.

If you are unlucky, you are the last person to find out about the move, typically on the Friday afternoon with everything set to roll on Saturday. Go straight to the 10-point checklist and the list of Action Points. When the dust settles, read this book to prepare for next time.

You could always run a satisfaction survey after the move to find out how successful it was. Compare this with how good it could have been if you had been able to do it properly and sell the difference. You might get more warning next time! There is an example survey in the appendices.

Traditionally, office moves have been the responsibility of the Office Services or Facilities department, employing a firm of removals people. In the good old days they could just pile everything into some boxes and move it. Now that businesses use computers, you will find that the computer systems and data are worth more to the business than physical assets like desks and chairs. Most people could work sitting on the floor with a packing crate for a desk, as long as their computer systems and their phones were up and running. Conversely, you could give them the nicest desks in the smartest layout, but if their phones and PCs don't work, you have failed!

In planning office moves these days you have to consider things like Service Levels, customer support and quality. 'Bung it in a box and budge it' is not good enough any more.

In the moves I've been involved with, the computers and printers are usually the responsibility of the people who support them day-to-day. Depending on your circumstances, this could be anything from a barefoot computer doctor in a small business to the PC Support Team in a large Corporate office. This book is aimed mainly at the large end of the scale. If you are alone and moving a handful of PCs unaided you should be just as careful, but you will have far less hassle.

Most of the comments and techniques described here apply to large moves, where you can employ a team of people. If you have less to work with, then adapt things. Where I refer to specific teams of people, you will have perhaps just the one team and you will have to give them different tasks to cover the necessary work.

Modern office moves are a team effort: no one group of Support staff can manage anything bigger than a simple desk shuffle on their own. Everyone will have their own responsibilities and will depend on the others for help and support. Facilities people need the IS people to make the phones and computers work. IS people need the Facilities people to provide office space, desks and chairs. Both sides will have their own specialist teams to be coordinated and communicated with.

The implications of getting it wrong can be expensive: I've seen people spend thousands reorganizing desks in a building that was about to be demolished. I've also seen people reorganize their own office layout, then call Support to complain that all the phone numbers had changed and the PCs had stopped working.

On the other hand, I have seen examples of success. One was moving a Trading Floor plus associated offices from one building to another across town. The whole move was done between closing down on Friday night and starting work at 6am on Monday morning. Everything worked.

Another example was the move of 500 people to a new building, done over six weekends. The move was phased so that people who worked together moved together. At the same time as the move, we also installed a new LAN, a complete new suite of PC desktop applications, and email. All the existing IS services kept working and all the new ones were available for use on the first working morning after each move.

It can be done!

All this planning assumes of course, that you are part of a business large enough to have separate IS and Building Services departments. In a really small operation, you have a charmed existence: the fewer the interfaces, the fewer the opportunities for politics and misunderstandings. All the rules and lessons described here still apply and the results should be no less professional. It will just be easier to get things done.

One final idea: even if you are not planning a move, read this book. The groundwork of creating and maintaining an inventory plus the knowledge of how to move IS equipment and services could form the basis of your Company's disaster recovery planning.

About the Author

Paul Friday is an 'experienced practitioner' in IT service management. He has worked in all aspects of IT/IS service delivery and management, before progressing to consultancy. His particular experience used in this book is from moving Trading Floors, office buildings, staff, computers and services, while maintaining the business functionality of the information systems. To quote him directly:

"I believe that the highest standard that business computing can aspire to is to
'just work' - to be dependable and useful and unremarkable. My consultancy work
is at the practical and useful end of the scale: analyzing and recommending solutions,
then implementing them. To use my analogy of move projects being like wars, I'm more
likely to be shouting "follow me!" than asking how things are going up at the Front.
This book is written for the people in the trenches."

What to do when the removers call

All businesses move or reorganise, it's a fact of life and a sign that the recession is over (or that someone has read a new management book). The best advice you can have if your business is moving is to take a vacation until it is over. A simple reorganisation of the seating plan may disrupt normal working for three days afterwards. A major renovation or move may put the business out of action for a month. If your business is planning to move its computer data center, then it may be time to scan the vacancy adverts during your vacation.

A study by the DRM Group found that more than 50% of businesses that suffered a major business interruption did not survive the experience. How long can your business survive not being fully functional?

Office moves are unpleasant irritations to the normal course of business, so they tend to be delegated to the person furthest down the line. Sometimes they are left to the removals company to organise. The staff only get involved when the packing cases arrive at their desks. "Typically, no-one knows in detail what has to be moved, so they spend time fixing the problems afterwards" says consultant Paul Friday, who advises clients in planning and managing office and data centre moves. "The desktop computers get moved because they are visible, but the services on which the business depends are not physical lumps of hardware, so they don't get moved properly". After even the simplest desk swap, it's not unusual to find that the phones don't have the right features and the numbers aren't right. The computer network may not work, and not all of the systems will be working. And it's guaranteed that the printers won't work or will be in the wrong places.

Now imagine a data center move, where the heart of the businesses information systems is being transplanted. These moves are often performed without considering the needs of the staff using the systems or the implications of the loss of service: a heart transplant without anaesthetic or heart-lung machine, if you will.

All of this pain can be avoided with some fairly basic planning. Knowing what you intend to move, how important it is to the business and how you will restore the service is often enough. Some simple scheduling will take care of minimising the impact of the move, and will let the people involved know what to expect. Checklists of systems and services will ensure that nothing is overlooked. "It's not rocket science" says Friday "but it is so often ignored in the rush to get the best seats. It really is possible to move business-critical staff and systems without losing a single minute of working time; I've done it with financial trading floors, and you don't get much more critical than that."

Paul Friday has explained these methods in a new book from Adams-Blake Publishing. Move IT is the complete guide to moving offices and data centers; the people, the computers and the cables. Available directly from the publisher, it is a clear and methodical guide to planning and managing moves of all sizes.

Is this book expensive (at $99)? Well, you could buy ten copies for the average cost of moving a single employee, once.

Moving your data center - unplug and pray?

For businesses that use technology, the data center is the heart of the business: it makes the lifeblood of information move. Depending on the size of the business, the data center may be anything from a single server to a mainframe plus attendants. Whatever you have, the data center is where the shared computing resources live.

Moving the data center is like performing a heart transplant, which is why it is odd that so many businesses do it without anaesthetic and while the patient is still at their desk working. Left to the IS/IT department, a data center move may be a feat of technical brilliance that leaves the business temporarily unable to work. Left to anyone else, a data center move may put you out of business. Research by the DRM Group shows that more than 50% of businesses that suffer a major interruption to doing business never survive the experience.

How should you plan and perform this most critical of business moves? For large data centers, the simplest way is to invoke your existing contingency plan. You should already have plans in place to take-over the provision of your business-critical systems in the event of a major incident. Now is the time to call-in your supplier and arrange a planned test of their services. You will have to pay, but you will have performed the best test of your arrangements short of setting fire to your offices. By planning ahead and being able to arrange when you need the facilities, the cost of your contingency support ought to be less than invoking the plan for real. Using your contingency planning makes a benefit out of the move by highlighting any problems and testing your response under calmer circumstances than you may one day have to!

If you do not have contingency arrangements or it would be too expensive to invoke them, then you will have to plan to minimise the impact on your critical business functions. This si where the IS/IT department would begin to fail if left to themselves. You need to prioritise which parts of the business are most important and must be kept running, and then plan the move around them. You may have to make special arrangements to keep these critical areas working while the main systems are being moved: perhaps running their system from a smaller machine or only moving their service overnight or at a weekend. The alternative is to recognize and accept the impact, then make alternative arrangements. If you will lose the use of your customer database, then now is the time to print-off Rolodex cards or paper directories and distribute them to staff. Now is also the time to contact your customers and tell them what to expect.

"Most people will cut you some slack, if you ask them first rather than tell them afterwards" says Paul Friday. Paul is an IT consultant with specialised experience in large computer moves. "If you explain to your customers that one of your systems will be out on a certain day in the future, and then tell them what steps you have taken to meet their needs, then they will usually support you. If you tell them that the system is down when they phone up, you will look like all the other business losers." he explains. The method for planning a data center move is not rocket science, it is just the methodical application of basic planning, while planning to stay in business.

There are just a few basic choices to be made on how to maintain the computing services, or to minimise the impact of the interruption. Doing something as basic as mapping the critical business times of your systems will show you if there are any safe periods to shut-down an IT service. The data center move then becomes an exercise in planning around these critical times or of finding alternative ways of delivering service.

These planning techniques and the basic scenarios are explained in a new book from Adams-Blake Publishing: Move IT - The Complete Guide to Moving Corporate Data Centers and Offices - The Staff, the Cable and the Machines. This guidebook explains simply and in great depth how to plan the move, organise the people and manage the event.