When the time comes to relocate, we don’t want you to be caught unaware, so we’ve prepared a quick guide that takes you through the three main challenges that IT relocation poses, and how to deal with them.
Planning
When relocating your office and it’s IT system, you have to consider many things. Firstly, and most importantly, you need to make sure that your new office is suitable for your needs. If your firm attempts to relocate but then finds out that the new office does not have the space or structure to support the amount of devices you need, you will be in trouble. So, it’s imperative that you have a thorough understanding of your IT systems and what kind of infrastructure they require to function. Make sure that your business IT support team helps you with this so that you are clear on what you do and don’t need. This may be quite time consuming, but it’s necessary in order to ensure a smooth transfer and post-move success.
Making sure that every task is completed on time can be more challenging than expected, but with the right IT support in place, you should manage to come up with as practical a plan as possible.
Budgeting
Budgeting for an IT move can be very difficult because there are many variables that can cause the cost to fluctuate. This is particularly difficult for an SME who is under pressure to keep within a tight budget.
A problem often encountered when trying to budget for a move is inaccurate quotes which give the wrong idea about the overall price. Subsequently, many companies do not have a real idea about the cost of a move and are often surprised when more costs are introduced.
The only way to mitigate these issues as effectively as possible is to arm yourself with as much information as you can before beginning the process. If you prepare for the relocation as thoroughly as possible and therefore budget accordingly, the amount of surprise costs will be greatly reduced.
Downtime
Shutting down operations for even as little as a day can impact your business. If customers are unable to reach you, they may approach your competitors instead.With this in mind, plan your move thoughtfully so that the amount of time that you’re unavailable to customers is limited. You could even consider moving personnel in stages so that you always have at least someone available to speak to customers.
This can be improved even further by completing at least some of the move over the weekend or at any other time your company may not be operational, to shorten downtime as much as possible.
Correct Group offers a comprehensive IT relocation service to help businesses make their transfer to new premises quickly and seamlessly. Please see here for more information about our relocation and other IT services.