Every office move has the same hidden critical path, and it isn’t the furniture: it’s the technology — specifically, one line item with a lead time nobody expects. Businesses plan moves around the lease date and the movers, then discover that the new space’s internet circuit takes 30–90 days to install, that the beautiful open-plan buildout has network drops in none of the right places, and that “we’ll just plug everything back in” was never a plan. Moves are also, quietly, an opportunity: the rare moment to fix a decade of accumulated infrastructure decisions at marginal cost. Here’s the timeline, working backward from opening day.
90+ days out: order the internet first, before almost anything
The moment the lease is signed — arguably the moment it’s likely — start the connectivity clock: survey what’s available at the address (fiber availability varies building by building, and it determines everything downstream) · order the circuit immediately, because business installs routinely run 30–90 days and the date is barely negotiable · and size it for the business you’re becoming — the connection is the hallway to everything now, so this is the moment to fix the asymmetric plan from 2019, and to price the failover line into the buildout while the decisions are all open anyway. If the circuit can’t be live by move day, decide the bridge now (cellular failover hardware doing double duty as the interim connection is the standard play), not during cutover weekend.
60 days out: cabling while the walls are open, and the audit you’ll never get a better excuse for
Walk the space with a network plan before the buildout finishes: drops where desks, printers, conference rooms, cameras, and Wi-Fi access points will actually live — structured cabling installed while walls are open costs a fraction of retrofitting, and Wi-Fi coverage designed for the floor plan beats the single-router prayer. Claim a real location for the equipment: a lockable space with power, cooling, and none of the plumbing adjacency that keeps water sensors employed. Meanwhile, run the move-forced audit: the asset inventory becomes the packing list, and everything on it gets a verdict — move it, replace it (hardware near lifecycle age should be replaced at the move, not paid to relocate twice), or retire it (with drives properly destroyed). Notify every vendor with the new address on their own lead times — phone/number porting especially, which has its own multi-week clock.
30 days out: rehearse the cutover on paper
Write the cutover plan like the change it is: sequence, owners, and rollback. The standard shape — network core and internet live and tested before anything else arrives · servers (if any remain — a move is the classic cloud-migration trigger, and gear that’s cloud-bound should move to the cloud, not the truck) shut down cleanly, with a verified backup taken first, transported with intention rather than tossed in with the chairs · workstations labeled by destination desk · and the people plan: who works where during the gap, phones forwarded how, and the two-sentence client notice if there’s any service window at all. Schedule the move for your calm season, never the busy one — the same calendar rule as every big change.
Move weekend and day one: test like a pilot, punch-list like a landlord
Cutover order: internet and core network verified first (a laptop and a speed test before a single desk is built) · Wi-Fi walked and tested in every corner · servers up and validated against the runbook’s checks · then desks, printers, conference rooms. Day one runs on a punch list, not tickets: one owner collecting every “my dock doesn’t work / this room has no signal / the label printer vanished” into a single list, worked in priority order — because move-week issues arrive in a burst that a normal queue mishandles, and first impressions of the new office are set in about 48 hours. Keep the old space’s services alive briefly where cheap (internet overlap for a couple of weeks is inexpensive rollback insurance), and close the loop behind you: old circuits cancelled on a calendar date, old address scrubbed from vendor records, the inventory updated to the new reality.
The bottom line
An office move’s IT succeeds or fails on lead times and sequencing: the circuit ordered the week the lease is signed, cabling designed while walls are open, the lifecycle audit run while everything’s in boxes anyway, a written cutover with a rollback, and a punch-list day one. Get the timeline right and the move becomes what it should be — the one week where your infrastructure got better — instead of the month where everyone learned how long a fiber install takes.