The IT Handover: What to Agree With Your Provider

The part of an office move that most often goes wrong is not the furniture. It is the assumption that somebody else was handling the technology, made by everybody involved at once.

A moving crew moves equipment. It does not commission a network. The gap between those two things is where Monday mornings are lost.

Just-In-Time Moving handles commercial moves across West Valley City and Salt Lake County.

Start with the circuit, months out

Internet installation at a new address is the longest lead time in the whole project and the one nobody starts early enough. Weeks is normal; longer is common if anything needs installing rather than activating.

Order it as soon as the lease is signed. Then get the installation confirmed in writing, and have a contingency, because dates move.

Everything else on this list depends on that circuit existing.

Agree who does what, explicitly

Write down which of these belongs to your IT provider and which to the movers:

Backing up servers and workstations before anything is unplugged. Disconnecting and labelling equipment. Physically transporting it. Reconnecting workstations. Configuring and testing the network. Reconnecting printers and shared devices. Testing phones.

Movers do the transporting, and usually the disconnection and reconnection of monitors and cables at desks if asked. The configuration and testing is your provider's. Say so in advance, in writing.

Back up before the move, not after

Full, verified backups of everything, done in advance and stored away from the equipment being moved. This is basic and it is skipped constantly.

Sequence the day so testing has time

The common error is scheduling the network work for the same afternoon everything arrives. Equipment turns up late, the crew is still building desks, and the provider is testing at seven in the evening.

Better: network and connectivity in place before the bulk arrives, then equipment, then a testing window the following morning with people available to fix what does not work.

Test with real users

Not just that the network is up. Have several people log in, print, join a call and open the systems they actually use, before the office is depended on.

Give us your labelling scheme and floor plan and equipment will land where your provider expects it.

Call (435) 862-3080 or email office@movingjustintime.com.