Planning a Summer Office Move? A Manchester Business Checklist

The Short Run: Summer’s the best window to move office because the place is quiet, but it only works if the network’s ready for the Monday everyone comes back. The jobs with the longest lead times, your connectivity and your lease notice, are the ones to start first rather than last. Survey the new space early, plan the cabling around the new layout, and test every point before anyone sits down.

The furniture goes in over the weekend. The desks are lined up, the chairs are unwrapped, everything looks ready. Then Monday morning arrives, thirty people sit down at once, and half of them can’t get online.

That’s how most office moves go wrong. Not the furniture. Not the boxes. The network.

Summer’s the busy season for office moves across Greater Manchester. Leases turn over, the schools break up, and a good chunk of the team’s on holiday, so there’s finally a quiet week to shift everything without stopping work. It’s the right instinct, and a move’s far less painful when half the office is away. But that quiet window only helps if the infrastructure’s ready to go live the day everyone comes back, and that’s the part most checklists treat as an afterthought.

Here’s what actually needs to happen, in the order it needs to happen, if you want day one in the new space to be a normal working day.

Why summer is the right window to move

The best time to do disruptive work is when the fewest people are around to be disrupted by it, and summer gives you exactly that. With staff taking annual leave through July and August, you can run the bulk of a move across a weekend or a quiet week and have the place working before the office fills back up.

It only works if the noisy trades are booked to match. We do most office moves after hours and at weekends for this reason, so the cabling and the kit are ready for the next working day rather than halfway through it. If you’re planning a summer move, it’s worth getting the dates in the diary early. The good weeks book up fast, and the ones either side of the August bank holiday tend to go first.

Start with a survey of the new space

Before anything gets booked, someone needs to walk the new space and look at what’s actually there. Not the glossy floor plan. The real thing.

How many data points are there, and where are they? Is there a comms room, and is it big enough for your kit with room to work around it? Where does the power come in? Are the containment and cable routes anywhere near where your desks are going? A space that looks perfect on paper often has the network points in all the wrong places, or nowhere near enough of them.

That’s why we offer free site surveys with no hidden charges in the quote. An hour on site before the move tells you what you’re working with, and it’s far cheaper than finding out on moving day that the meeting rooms have no cabling run to them.

The timeline that actually matters

It’s tempting to book the movers first and feel like you’ve made a start. But there’s one job that really needs to be top of the list, and it’s an easy one to overlook.

It’s your connectivity. A new business line or leased line can take 60 to 90 days from order to activation, which is longer than most people expect. If your move’s only six weeks away and the order hasn’t gone in, you’re already behind, and no amount of careful cabling can bring a circuit to life any faster. So get that ordered first, then plan everything else around it.

It’s worth checking your lease early too. Most need three to six months’ notice before you leave, and a lot include a restoration clause, meaning you hand the old space back the way you found it. Give that clause a proper read now, because stripping out the old cabling takes time and budget that’s easy to forget.

The infrastructure checklist

This is the part the generic checklists skip past. Work through it properly and the rest of the move gets a lot simpler.

• Plan the structured cabling for the new layout, not the old one. If the desk plan’s changed, the cabling has to change with it, and Cat6a as a minimum gives you headroom for years rather than months.

• Move the comms room and servers as a planned job, not a last-minute lift. Power, cooling and space all need checking before the racks arrive.

• Design the Wi-Fi around the new floor plan. A different building means different dead spots, so a proper business Wi-Fi installation is a survey and a design, not a case of moving the old access points and hoping.

• Sort the CCTV and access control so the building’s secure from the first morning, not a fortnight later.

• Confirm the power and floor boxes land where the desks actually go, so nobody’s running trailing leads across walkways on day one.

• Test and certify every point before anyone sits down. This is the step that turns a move into a normal Monday.

Moving day and keeping downtime down

The businesses that move well rarely do it all in one hit. They move in phases, get one department live and working, then bring the next one across. It keeps the business running, and it means any problem stays contained rather than going company-wide.

Whatever the approach, nothing goes live until it’s been tested. Network, phones, security access, the lot. We back our structured cabling installations with a 25-year manufacturer warranty, and the reason we can is that every point’s certified before we hand it over. Guessing is what causes the Monday morning scramble.

The bits that trip people up

Hybrid working’s changed what an office needs. Fewer fixed desks, more shared space and meeting rooms, which means the cabling and coverage requirements are different from the last time you moved. It’s worth planning for how the team works now, not how they worked in 2019.

Don’t treat the old kit as a given, either. Access points that covered the last office can leave gaps in this one. And don’t forget the office you’re leaving. The lease restoration and the strip-out are part of the move too, and they carry a deadline of their own.

Moving this summer? Start with a free site survey.

If you’re planning a move and want the network side handled properly, the place to start is a survey of the new space. Not a quote based on square footage. An actual survey, on site, before anything’s booked.

Viking Communications handles office IT relocation for businesses across Greater Manchester and the UK, backed by a 25-year manufacturer warranty on the structured cabling and a fully accredited team. We work out of hours and at weekends to keep disruption down, and site surveys are free with no hidden charges in the quote.

📞 0161 660 3002

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