Moving your Office to Canary Wharf

Posted on 10/05/2013

Canary Wharf is ideally situated close to London, and is one of the biggest business centres in the UK today, therefore it makes perfect sense for you to want to move your head offices there. Moving offices is as stressful as moving home, there are a number of things to consider and remember to do, and as a result of this things can often be forgotten.

Before you start planning the move there are some things that you should consider:

- Have you received the relevant approval from the senior management within the company to move office?

- How much can you spend on the budget?

- What type of property are you looking for? Considering size, location, the length and type of lease, car parking, etc.

- What is the deadline the move should be completed by?

- Make yourself a timetable, for example find new office within 2 months, sign lease for new office within 3 months, etc. Setting yourself deadline like this will make sure that you don't fall behind with the plans, and it will help you to remember to do everything.

- Allocate the budget and produce a full breakdown of what you are going to spend on things like rent, deposits, professionals fees, office equipment, furniture, removal fees and amendments of the stationary to reflect new address.

- Set up a 'moving team' within your company who can organise all of the employees and can help the move to run smoothly. You can hold regular meetings with these staff members and get input from them, you can delegate tasks giving you more time to make the bigger decisions.

When you have viewed and selected a property you should:

- Design the layout, allocate different areas of the office for different teams, identify where the conference room is going to be, which of the offices belong to which manager, where you want to place shared equipment (e.g. printers) and which room you will use for storage.

- Consider your telecommunications needs, how many telephone points do you need and where? Where will the fax machine(s) go? Where will computers be placed, can they be networked and how many internet ports do you need? Is all of this equipment in good condition or will you need to replace any of it?

- Where will the furniture go? Do you have enough/too much? Is the furniture you have in good condition? Will you need to buy or get rid of any furniture?

- You can start notifying people of your move now, get your clients and supplier up to date and sell the move to them as 'we are moving to better and bigger premises'.

- Arrange a removals company or hire a van. Before you move into your new office you should:

- Check you know how the alarm works.

- Check the air con and the heating, set these to the desired temperatures or turn them back off.

- Make sure you have set up a secure storage for sensitive information during the move.

- Ensure things like the telephone sockets and internet ports are all in place and dully operational.

- Do an inspection of the new office to make sure that there are no damages that you need to report to the landlord.

- Set up a team of staff in the new office with computers and telephones, so that during the move your company is still fully operational, this will mean having a small team in place in the old office in case something in the new office were to go wrong (for example the telephone lines aren't working etc.) this cross-over of staff will ensure your clients aren't affected by the move.