Moving Office: The IT Runbook

An office move fails on connectivity or it fails on phones. Everything else can be recovered on the Monday. The single decision that determines whether your move is calm or catastrophic is when you place the carrier order, and almost every business places it far too late because it is waiting on a lease that is still with the lawyers.

This is the sequence we run. The week markers below are our planning schedule rather than published vendor lead times, and where a carrier or regulator publishes an actual figure we say so explicitly.

Twelve weeks out: three decisions, one of which cannot wait for the lease

Three things get decided at twelve weeks. Two of them are cheap to change later. One is not.

Decision one, and the urgent one: what connects the new site to the internet. Order this before the lease is signed if you possibly can, on a conditional basis, because carrier delivery is the longest single item on the critical path and it does not care about your moving date.

Start by checking what serves the address. nbn Co’s address checker will tell you whether a premises is ready to connect, whether more work is required, or whether it is not currently available, and the technology serving it. That check is free and takes a minute. If the building is served by a non-nbn network such as Opticomm, the process runs through that operator instead. If you need symmetrical, higher-grade connectivity, nbn Enterprise Ethernet is the wholesale product, delivered over dedicated point-to-point fibre wherever nbn has declared the fixed line footprint ready for service, and where fibre is not already in the building it requires a build.

nbn publishes no build or delivery time for Enterprise Ethernet. Its customer-facing pages say only that it will work with your provider to confirm a committed delivery date. The single delivery figure in nbn’s published material is in the wholesale agreement, in the Service Levels Schedule for the Enterprise Ethernet product module, and it is an operational target that nbn states is non-binding, aspirational and not reported to the retail service provider: nbn aims to provide a Committed Delivery Date within 10 business days of the Order Accepted Notification. That is ten business days to be given a date, not ten business days to be connected.

Once the Committed Delivery Date exists it does carry weight, but the weight falls on the wrong side of the counter. If delivery is late against it, nbn pays rebates to your retail service provider, not to you: for an Ordered Product with a Committed Delivery Date on or after 15 November 2021, 100 per cent of the monthly recurring charge whether delivery runs 5 to 9 business days late or 10 business days or more late. That will not fund a fortnight of not trading.

So treat the timeline as entirely retail service provider dependent, which is exactly why it belongs at week twelve rather than week four. Get the Committed Delivery Date in writing from the retail service provider, with the slip terms, and get it before you commit to a moving weekend.

Two things to specify while you are ordering. First, whether you want enhanced service levels. nbn Co lets providers opt in to enhanced service levels on business plans, and defines them across three components: the operational period (the hours during which faults can be worked), the response time, and the rectification time for faults within nbn’s control. A standard consumer-grade service can be restored on a timeline that would be unacceptable for a business that cannot trade without it. Second, order a backup path at the same time. A 4G or 5G failover service, or a satellite link, ordered on day one costs a fraction of what it costs to arrange in a panic in week eleven. If the address is marginal, read business internet options in the outer east and work out which nbn technology serves the address before you assume anything.

Decision two: whether the phone numbers move with you. If you are still on any service with physical dependency on the old address, the numbers have to port, and porting is the second-longest item on the critical path. More on the mechanics below, but the decision is made now.

Decision three: what the new site’s network will be. Platform choice, switch count, access point count, whether the comms room needs a rack or a wall-mounted cabinet. This drives the cabling design, which drives the electrician and the builder, which is why it has to be settled before anyone touches the walls. The comparison is in which network platform the new site should run.

Ten weeks out: survey the new premises properly

The site survey is not a walk-through. It produces a drawing.

Walk the floor plate with the person who will do the cabling and mark: every desk position and how many outlets each needs, every wireless access point position, every printer, every camera, every door with access control, every screen, and the comms room. Note ceiling type and height, because it determines cable pathway and access point mounting. Note where the building’s lead-in and any existing carrier equipment sits, because your comms room wants to be near it.

In the comms room, confirm three things that get missed: dedicated power circuits with enough outlets, ventilation or cooling adequate for a sealed room in a Melbourne February, and physical security. A cabinet in an open corridor that anyone can walk up to is not a comms room. The detail is in designing the comms room and the cabling standards in structured cabling done properly. Work out the UPS you need now, not when the rack is already full.

Two survey items that consistently get skipped. First, meeting rooms: measure them, decide the AV approach, and specify the table power and cable runs before the joiner builds the table. Retrofitting power to a boardroom table is expensive and ugly. Read meeting room AV before you sign off on room design. Second, wireless: do a real predictive design rather than spacing access points evenly, because plasterboard, glass partitioning and metal racking behave very differently.

Finally, agree the labelling scheme now and put it in your documentation set. Every outlet, every patch panel port, every switch port. Do it once at the front and you never do it again.

Eight weeks out: submit the port, and understand what you have submitted

Number porting in Australia runs under the Local Number Portability Code, C540:2023, registered by the ACMA on 1 June 2023. The code introduced completion timeframes where previous versions had none. For a single number being ported, the ACMA states the code generally requires telcos to complete 80 per cent of ports within 8 business days, 90 per cent within 10 business days, and 98 per cent within 15 business days, with the timeframes varying by the number of services and the complexity of the port.

Read that carefully, because most businesses moving office are not porting a single number.

Simple versus complex is the distinction that matters. A simple port (Category A) is a single standalone number. A complex port (Category C) covers multiple lines, DID number ranges, and ISDN services. The percentile timeframes above apply to single-number ports. Complex ports are project managed manually between nominated contacts at the losing and gaining carriers, with a mutually agreed cutover date, and the code does not set a maximum completion timeframe for them. If your business has a main number with a block of direct dial numbers behind it, you have a complex port, and you should treat the timeline as open ended until the carriers agree a date in writing.

Practical points that prevent rejections:

• The Customer Authority is valid for 90 days from signature. Sign it too early and it expires before the port runs. This is a documented rejection ground.
• Account details must match exactly. The account number with the losing carrier, the account name, and the service address as the losing carrier holds them. A trading name where the carrier holds a company name will fail.
• A losing carrier cannot reject a port because you are still in contract. The ACMA’s guidance to telcos is that they must tell a customer about the costs of changing providers, including contract terms, but that is not a basis to block the transfer. Exit fees may still be payable. The port still proceeds.
• Other valid rejection grounds include the service being disconnected or pending disconnection, a port already pending on that number, the number no longer being with that carrier, and insufficient information supplied.

If you are moving to a cloud phone system anyway, the move is the right moment. Numbers ported to a hosted 3CX system stop being tied to a physical address at all, which removes this problem from every future move. Whoever sells you the voice service takes on obligations under the Telecommunications Consumer Protections Code, C628:2019 as varied in 2022, which is the currently registered version, and the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman is the external dispute resolution path if it goes wrong. That is covered in what the TCP Code means when your IT provider sells you phones.

Six weeks out: settle the data and server position

Where your data lives determines how hard the weekend is.

If everything is in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, and there is no on-premises server, the weekend is easy. People carry laptops to a new building and sign in. Nothing moves. This is the strongest single argument for finishing a cloud migration before a move rather than after it.

If there is an on-premises server, decide now whether it moves or retires. Physically relocating a server is the highest-risk item in the entire move: it has been running for years, it may not survive a power cycle, and its disks do not enjoy being carried down stairs. If it is at end of life, the move is the natural retirement point and the cost of replacing it now is lower than the cost of moving it and replacing it in eighteen months anyway.

Whatever you decide, this is the week you verify that backups you have actually tested restore. Not that they ran. That they restore. Take a full verified backup immediately before anything is unplugged, and keep a copy off site and offline through the entire move.

Also at six weeks: line up the printers. Multifunction devices are usually on a lease with the supplier responsible for relocation, and their calendar is not your calendar. Book the de-install and re-install now, confirm the new IP addressing, and confirm scan-to-email and scan-to-folder settings will be reconfigured, because they always break.

Four weeks out: the sequence that has to hold

By four weeks you should be able to state the following as facts, not hopes:

• The carrier has a confirmed installation date at the new site, and it is at least two weeks before the move, not the Friday of it.
• Cabling is scheduled and the comms room will be ready to accept equipment before the movers arrive.
• The port has a confirmed cutover date and time agreed by both carriers.
• Every asset that is moving is on an accurate asset register, with a destination location.
• Building access is arranged for the weekend, including loading dock booking, lift booking and after-hours security access for both buildings.

If the carrier date is not confirmed at four weeks, escalate now and plan a fallback: a temporary 4G or 5G service and a Starlink terminal will keep a business trading for a few weeks, badly but functionally, and arranging that at four weeks is a decision. At four days it is a crisis.

Two weeks out: bring the new site live before you need it

This is the step that separates a calm move from a bad one. Get the new site’s internet, network and wireless working, tested and signed off two weeks before anyone moves into it.

Install the gateway, switches and access points. Bring the carrier service up and test it under load, not with a single speed test. Configure VLANs, wireless, firewall rules and remote access. Put a laptop and a printer on it and use them. Find the problems in a quiet building with two weeks to fix them, rather than at nine o’clock on a Monday morning with 60 people watching.

For a period you will be running both sites simultaneously, which is a small version of the problem in running two sites at once. Keep it deliberately simple: both sites reach the same cloud services independently, and nothing at the new site depends on the old one.

The weekend, hour by hour

Assume a Friday close and a Monday open. The critical instruction: do not port numbers on the Friday of the move.

The reasoning is in the code text, and it is worth quoting because it sets the window you are working inside. C540:2023 defines Standard Hours of Operation as “8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (Standard Time) on Business Days”, where Standard Time means Australian Eastern Standard Time or Australian Eastern Daylight-Saving Time. That is the window. The Code does not oblige a carrier to port outside those hours, and where a carrier does agree to port outside them, that port normally runs through the complex Cat. C process.

Two more numbers from the same code that shape a move. For a complex port, the minimum lead time for a cutover date within Standard Hours of Operation, measured from the gaining provider receiving a valid Complex Port Confirmation Advice, is 5 business days, and losing carriers must support 85 per cent of gaining provider requests for a cutover date within those hours. Rejections on a complex port also have their own clock: the losing carrier must issue a reject advice for 90 per cent of failed validations within three business days and 99 per cent within five business days. Build that into your schedule, because a rejection you learn about on day five costs you a fortnight.

Now apply it. If a Friday port fails or partially completes at four in the afternoon, the window closes at five, the people at both carriers who can fix it have gone home, and you spend the weekend with numbers that ring nowhere and no way to escalate. Port on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, early in the window, with the old service still live and calls forwarding, and keep the whole week either side clear.

The sequence:

Friday, from midday. Last full verified backup. Users log off and shut down. Label and photograph every cable at the back of every device before anything is unplugged, including the server, the rack and the printers. Confirm the old site’s internet stays live over the weekend.

Friday afternoon. Decommission the old comms room. Rack equipment out, patch leads bagged and labelled, switches boxed. Anything not moving goes into a separate, clearly marked pile for disposal, not into the skip.

Friday evening to Saturday morning. Physical transport. The server, if it is moving, travels separately and carefully, not on a pallet with the desks.

Saturday. Rack and cable the new comms room. Patch and test every desk outlet, port by port, against the labelling scheme. This is slow and it is the reason you did the labelling properly. Bring up the server if there is one and verify services before anyone touches a desk.

Saturday afternoon to Sunday. Deploy desk equipment. Every workstation, monitor, dock and phone placed, connected and powered on. Test each desk with a real login, not a link light. Install and test printers, including scan destinations. Test the meeting rooms with a real call on each platform you use.

Sunday. Full walk-through with a checklist. Wireless coverage tested in every corner, including stairwells and the kitchen. Door access and cameras tested. Alarm tested. Sign off, or list what is outstanding and who is fixing it Monday morning.

The first Monday

Have people on site, physically, from before the first staff member arrives. Not on a phone queue. On the floor.

The Monday problems are predictable: a desk that was patched to the wrong port, a printer that will not scan, someone whose docking station did not come, a meeting room that will not connect, and a wireless dead spot behind a filing cabinet nobody surveyed. All small, all fast to fix, all catastrophic to a business’s confidence if the response is a ticket number.

Run a defect list for the whole first week rather than fixing things ad hoc. Everything gets logged, triaged and closed, and at the end of the week you have a record of what the fit-out got wrong, which is worth having when you talk to the builder.

The old site: decommissioning and make-good, which the landlord will invoice you for

This is the part businesses forget until the invoice arrives, and it is genuinely expensive.

Read your make-good clause before the move, not after it. Commercial leases commonly require the premises to be returned to their original condition, and in practice that means removing what you installed. For IT, that typically covers your data cabling, including cable in ceiling and floor spaces, your comms room fit-out including the rack and any cabinets, wall-mounted screens and their brackets, access control hardware on doors, camera mounts, and any penetrations made through walls, floors or ceilings, which have to be patched and made good. Some landlords require the cabling to be removed. Some require it to be left in place. Some require it to be left and certified. These are opposite obligations and only your lease tells you which one applies.

Budget for it and schedule it. Cable removal after the fit-out contractor has left, in an empty building, with a lift booking, is not a job you want to be arranging in the week the keys are due back.

Terminate the services, in the right order. Cancel the old site’s internet service only after the new site has been stable for a period and after any porting has fully completed. Cancel building access, alarm monitoring and any service tied to the old address. Then check the next invoice, because services keep billing long after they stop being used and nobody notices for months.

Deal with the equipment properly. Anything not moving falls into three categories: redeployed, sold or traded, or disposed of. Every device in the last two categories has data on it, including printers and multifunction devices, which hold scanned documents on internal drives, and cameras and access control controllers, which hold footage and personal information. Disposal without a certificate of data destruction is a Privacy Act problem waiting to become a notifiable data breach. The process is in secure device disposal.

Update the documentation. New addresses, new subnets, new device locations, new circuit IDs, new carrier account numbers. If the documentation still describes the old building in six months, the move is not finished.

If you are planning a move and want the carrier order placed before it is too late, that is the one call worth making early. Call TechAssist on 1300 028 324 or get in touch at https://techassist.au/contact/, and we will tell you what the realistic critical path looks like for your specific address and your specific numbers. If you are also fitting out the new space, start with the fit-out checklist for the new premises.

The most expensive mistakes in an office fit-out are made before anyone thinks about IT. Cable routes that were never allowed for, a comms cupboard with no power and no air, and a carrier order placed after the lease was signed instead of before. Two of those three cost you plasterboard to fix. The third costs you an office you cannot trade from.

Fit-out IT is the permanent technology infrastructure built into a tenancy while it is under construction: the structured cabling, the pathways it runs in, the comms room, the access point and camera positions, the floor boxes, and the carrier service that feeds all of it. It is defined by the fact that most of it becomes inaccessible once the building is finished.

This is written for the operations manager running the project, sequenced against the build programme rather than grouped by technology. Work through it in order.

Stage 1: before the builder starts

These are design decisions. Every one of them is cheap now and expensive later.

Order the carrier service. This is the single most common cause of a business moving into a new office with no internet, and it is entirely avoidable. A new service at a new address is not a phone call, it is an order with a build behind it. nbn is explicit that for Enterprise Ethernet it designs and builds a new fibre connection tailored to the premises, that installation is handled by specialist project teams for complex environments like shopping centres, business parks and high-rise buildings, and that a committed delivery date is confirmed with your service provider. Civil works may be involved.

nbn does not publish a delivery target in business days, and that is the useful finding. There is no customer-facing figure at all. The only delivery number anywhere in nbn’s published material sits in the wholesale agreement, in the Service Levels Schedule for the nbn Enterprise Ethernet product module, and it is not what people assume: nbn aims to provide a Committed Delivery Date within 10 business days of the Order Accepted Notification, and that target is expressly stated to be non-binding, aspirational, and not even reported to the retail service provider. Ten business days to be told a date, not ten business days to get a service.

What does bind is the Committed Delivery Date itself, once given. If nbn delivers late against it, rebates accrue to your retail service provider: for an Ordered Product with a Committed Delivery Date on or after 15 November 2021, 100 per cent of the monthly recurring charge whether delivery is 5 to 9 business days late or 10 business days or more late. Read that carefully. The rebate is payable to your provider, not to you, and it does not compensate you for a building you cannot trade from.

The practical consequence for a fit-out programme is that your carrier lead time is a retail service provider commitment, not an nbn published standard, and it will vary by address, by building complexity and by whether a build is required. Do not plan against a number you found on a comparison site. Make the retailer put the Committed Delivery Date in writing, along with what happens contractually if it slips, and treat the date before you have that as unknown.

Place the order the week the lease is signed, not the week before handover. If the build timeline will not make your move date, you need to know early enough to arrange an interim service. This is the point at which you should be ordering the carrier service first and building the rest of the programme around it.

Fix the comms room location on the drawings. Not “somewhere near the back”. A specific room, with a door, a dedicated power circuit and a way for heat to leave. Get it onto the architectural set before the layout is frozen, because moving it later moves every cable in the building. There is a full treatment of how to design the comms room itself, and it should be read at this stage, not at fitout.

Set the headcount you are cabling for. Not today’s headcount. The headcount at the end of the lease, plus the desks you will add when you take the adjacent tenancy. Outlets are cheap while the walls are open and brutal afterwards.

Specify the cabling grade above current need. Structured cabling for commercial premises in Australia and New Zealand is covered by AS/NZS 11801.1:2019, which is the local adoption of the ISO/IEC 11801 series and replaces the older AS/NZS 3080. The grade you choose sets the ceiling on everything for the life of the fit-out.

The reasoning is simple. Active equipment gets replaced every four to six years. Cable in a wall gets replaced when you next renovate, which might be never. Wireless access points and cameras increasingly draw more power over the same cable, and higher Power over Ethernet classes generate more heat in the bundle. Specify the higher category, specify shielded where you are running near plant or lift motors, and accept the extra cost now.

Decide the access point positions from a plan. Not by counting rooms. Wireless design starts from the floor plan, the wall construction, the ceiling type and where people will actually sit, and it produces marked positions with a cable to each one. There is a fuller treatment of designing wireless coverage from a plan which applies just as much to an office as a warehouse. Add a spare cable to every position and one or two more positions than the design calls for, because a plasterboard ceiling is a one-time opportunity.

Decide what else rides on the network. Access control readers, door controllers, cameras, intercoms, room booking panels, digital signage, EFTPOS. Each of these needs a cable and most need PoE. Work out CCTV and access control on the same network now, because a door controller discovered at fitout is a cable that has to be surface mounted.

Stage 2: before plasterboard goes up

This is the expensive one. Once the sheets are on, everything below costs you a repair, a repaint and a delay.

First fix the cabling. Every outlet, every access point, every camera, every door, every meeting room, every floor box, run back to the comms room. Overshoot on quantity. A spare outlet costs a fraction of a retrofit.

Get the separation from power right. Telecommunications cabling in Australia is governed by AS/CA S009:2020 Installation requirements for customer cabling, the Wiring Rules published by the Australian Telecommunications Alliance. The ACMA makes it mandatory through the Telecommunications Cabling Provider Rules 2014. Among other things it sets out that telecommunications cabling must be separated from electrical cabling. This is not a best-practice suggestion. It is a compliance requirement, and it is enforced through registered cabler obligations.

Practically, this means the electrical contractor and the cabling contractor need to agree routes before either starts, and that the separation applies in trays, in conduits, in risers and at the outlet. Data and power sharing a stud cavity because it was convenient on the day is how a fit-out fails its own certification.

Pathways and spaces. AS/NZS 3084:2017 covers telecommunications pathways and spaces for commercial buildings. This is the standard that governs cable tray, risers, conduits, ceiling routes and the equipment room itself. Ask the cabling contractor to reference it in their scope. If they cannot, that tells you something.

Conduits for door hardware and access control. Every controlled door needs a path from the door frame to the controller and from the controller to the comms room. Electric strikes, maglocks, readers, request-to-exit sensors and door position switches all need cable. Doors are usually the last thing decided and the first thing that cannot be retrofitted neatly, because the conduit has to be in the frame.

Floor boxes and desk power. Fix the desk layout before the slab penetrations and the floor box positions are set. Every floor box needs both power and data, sized for the desk pod it serves and for one more person at that pod than the layout shows. Under-floor and in-slab routes are permanent, so get the count right.

Meeting rooms. Every meeting room needs at least a cabled connection to the display position, a cabled connection to the camera and speaker position, power at both, and a route between them that does not cross the room at head height. Decide the mounting height of the display now, because the outlet has to be behind it.

Comms room backing and containment. Plywood backing boards, cable entry points, tray into the room, and the floor space for the rack marked out and protected. If a rack is going in, the door and the route to it need to fit the rack.

Take photographs. Before the sheets go on, photograph every wall with cable in it, with a tape measure in shot. This is the cheapest as-built documentation you will ever produce and you will use it within two years.

Stage 3: at fitout

Second fix. Terminate the outlets, fit the plates, mount the access points, hang the cameras, terminate the patch panels.

Build the rack. Patch panels at the top, switches beneath them, room for growth, cable management between every panel and switch, and the carrier equipment positioned to the carrier’s own requirements. nbn’s BNTD location guide is worth reading before the rack is laid out. For a rack-mounted Enterprise Ethernet install it specifies a minimum rack depth of 300mm for the tray, a mandatory 1RU clearance for cooling the BNTD, a minimum 26mm clearance at the cooling vents, a recommended minimum front clearance of 900mm, a 240V general power outlet or IEC C13 PDU within 1m, a maximum mounting height of 2.4m with below 1.8m preferred, and a communications earth or rack earth. Space reserved for the carrier must stay reserved.

Label as you go. Administration of communications cabling systems is covered by AS/NZS 3085.1:2004. A labelling scheme decided at handover is a labelling scheme that never gets applied. Decide it before termination and apply it at both ends.

Power the room properly. Dedicated circuits, enough outlets, and the UPS in place before equipment goes in rather than added afterwards.

Stage 4: at handover

This is where you find out whether you got what you paid for.

Certification testing, not a link light. Every cable run must be tested against the performance class it was specified to, with a calibrated field tester, and the results supplied as a report per outlet. A cable that carries traffic today is not the same as a cable that passes certification. The difference shows up at higher speeds and higher PoE loads, sometimes years later.

The cabler’s statement of compliance. Under the Telecommunications Cabling Provider Rules 2014, after finishing a job a registered cabler must prepare a written statement certifying that the work complies with the Wiring Rules, give a copy to the customer who commissioned the work, give a copy to their employer or contractor, and keep a copy. You are the customer. Ask for it. If nobody can produce it, the work was not done by a registered cabler or the paperwork was skipped, and either way you have a problem to solve now rather than at the next audit.

As-built documentation. Floor plan with every outlet numbered, patch schedule, rack elevation, access point positions with names, camera and door positions, carrier service details with the service ID, and the photographs from stage two. This should be handed over as a set, not reconstructed later by whoever inherits the site.

Warranty and defects. Get the cabling warranty terms in writing and note the defects liability period. Walk the site with the cabling contractor and list anything unterminated, unlabelled, unfixed or untested before you sign off.

A functional test of the things that are not cables. Every meeting room display, every access point at the far corners with an actual device, every door, every camera view, the phone system at every desk, and a full failover test of the internet service if you have a second link.

The two failures worth naming

Almost every fit-out that goes badly fails in one of two ways.

The first is the carrier service. Everything else in this list can be recovered with money and a weekend. A fibre build that has not started cannot be accelerated by shouting at anyone. Order it first.

The second is the comms room. It gets allocated to whatever space nobody else wanted, which is usually a cupboard with one power point and no ventilation, and within eighteen months it is the hottest and least accessible room in the building. Design it deliberately.

If your fit-out is also a relocation, the move itself is a separate piece of work with its own sequence, and the cabling side of it is covered in professional data cabling.

Send us the floor plan and the build programme and we will mark up the IT scope against your milestones, including the date the carrier order has to be placed. TechAssist does cabling, comms rooms and fit-out IT in-house rather than subcontracting it. Call 1300 028 324 or use https://techassist.au/contact/.