How to Plan an Easy-Going Office Relocation

While moving from one home to another can be hectic, moving a business involves even much more complications. The process is much more exhaustive than transporting desks and office appliances, such as computers, photocopiers, printers etc from one establishment to another. Planning ahead in detail is the key to manage the move as seamless as possible while avoiding any downtime or confusion.

Plan ahead

Don’t fall for the false presumption that your office move will go smoothly by itself or you risk to end up racing for furniture or unresolved issues just a few days before moving. Instead of that, you should start preparing a checklist pointing out the tasks and timeline you need to follow and use it as a guide to keep the move organized.

Every office move is unique and so your tasks list, but you can still employ some of the ready-to-view office move checklists on the internet to make sure that you’ve considered all the key factors and nothing is left out.

The best way to organize the sequences of actions is by time scale: things that need to be done early in advance, things that can be done right before the move and things that are to be done on the big day. A moving calendar is the best solution for minimizing the impact of the move on your business. Another way to create a smoother move is to invest in a Security camera system for each office location in order to protect business stock from being stolen during the transfer.

Consider your occupancy needs

Before looking for a new space it is a worthwhile exercise to perform an occupancy review and spend some time understanding the workspace requirements of your business. This is a good time to work out how much space is actually used and necessary, but in order to determine how much office space your business actually needs you should also include in the equation the expectations for the growth of your business over the next few years. It is a wise idea to have some additional space in reserve to accommodate future growth than to face another office move after only a short period of time.

Create a new office floor plan

Once the numbers resulting from your occupancy audit are available you will have an idea about how big the new place should be so you can start preparing a floor plan of your new office. A floor plan is a great way to bridge the gap between ideas and visualisation, allowing you to plan, preview and make any necessary adjustments prior to contracting furniture or services for the new space, thus saving you both time and money.

With a floor layout before your eyes, you should be able to estimate the exact amount of furniture needed to accommodate employees as well as expected guests. At the same time you will avoid ordering too much furniture, so that walkways are too narrow, or not being able to fit everything, and ultimately you will get a feel for the layout of the office. This helps design the space to make it efficient, and also determine where to place things like white boards, electrical outlets, etc, before getting the furniture in.

How to choose the right floor planning tool?

A simple Google search shows that there are a lot of floor planning solutions on the Internet. But what factors you should consider when selecting the best app for you?

A good tool should allow you to easily draw your empty suite space at scale, with wall placements, doors and windows, flooring options. Further, you should be able to select from a large range of office furniture, appliances and decor to mix-and-match and review how well the pieces you consider ordering it. There are floor planning tools that even feature a 3D view, which is great to be able to preview how space will actually look like from all angles. Another useful features you should look for are the ones allowing you to save, share and generate quality printouts or exports of your work.

If you consider that space planning software is a complicated matter and is for trained experts only, you will be happy to hear that some of such recent apps are designed to be used by anyone, without prior knowledge of using floor planning software.

From a cost perspective, some of the available solutions are free or very affordable. PlanningWiz, for example, is a subscription based cloud solution with a free account allowing to create up to five projects for no costs.

While office relocation it’s a challenging mission, great project and space planning can guarantee a successful move. Floor planning apps are great to try out ideas before committing to them in the real life and a real moving hack when it comes to relocating your office.

Have you moved your office recently? Is there anything you would have done differently? If so, please share your thoughts about this article and your own experience in comments.