Moving a $1 Billion Corporate HQ in 3 Days...

BACKGROUND: Well, that's not really possible, unless you spend months preparing to do it. That was the task my team and I were recently assigned and pulled off with about 7 months advanced notice. We were moving corporate headquarters about 2 miles and yet a world away from our 3rd startup home. Initially, the company was run from the founder's home, then a small 4 person office leased from their preferred title company and finally an ever expanding series of offices on the 2nd floor of a building designed by doctors for doctors. A maze of offices mostly lacking windows and very small communication closets coupled with poor facilities management and extremely limited parking made this place less than ideal for our growing needs. We had moved doors and walls about 8 times in that building until we had the entire 2nd floor to ourselves.

NEW DIGS: Our Chairman and our President found us a spot with about the same square footage, less wasted hallway spaces, and a bright, airy open concept that included a reasonably sized IDF room where we could ensconce our ever growing collection of switches, firewalls and servers. The unknowable part was when we could actually move. When asked, I told them 90 days minimum with access to both spaces, but I could front load our prep work to make the most of those 90 days and accomplish the move across a 3 day weekend. Doing it over a weekend was a requirement by them, but it had to be a 3 day for IT to make it happen.

PREP: Knowing our exact needs was the first order of business, so we set about surveying every user, device and system in the office. While that was in work, we ordered large ticket items like new servers, switches, and firewalls with the plan being that our old infrastructure equipment could upgrade our aging disaster recovery systems to better capabilities once the move was done. Contractor related taskings were identified and contractors bid and assigned work to begin once we had access to the new spaces while the lease negotiations were proceeding.

PLAN: A bright fellow once told me that a plan is at least something you can deviate from, so I planned our landing at the new office in stages:

1. Procurements: Based on our surveys, we now had the data we needed to fine tune our purchases for exact numbers of equipment. Some of the new gear like phone headsets needed testing and revision more than once before we selected a system and ordered large numbers.
2. Design: The new space had some different and better network connectivity options and so we redesigned the network to some degree breaking it into rational segments and speeding those segments with better back-plane options. All this work was documented and applied to the new equipment as it arrived.
3. Cabling: The new building would need new cabling and as soon as I could get a seating chart together and enough wall infrastructure finished, wiring could begin. Pretty simple plan for 3 drops to each workstation and 2 to each copier location. Conference rooms and the reception area feature big TVs in numbers for some along with some advanced teleconferencing gear and tap schedulers for the rooms. So all that had to be powered, networked, and video cabled as well.
4. IDF: The existing IDF featured 5 racks, but we only needed 3 with the available extra space being for temporarily housing our old gear before it moved to our DR site, and for storage later. Switches, Firewalls, Servers, and UPS systems were to be placed as soon as Internet connections became available for synchronization with the current office.
5. Desktops: These were procured and tested well in advance and a contractor was assigned to perform installations and build an Intune based profile to automate most configuration work at the new location after installation.
6. Final Day: Printers, laptops, desktop scanners, and copiers all had to move on the 3 day weekend so everyone could keep hammering on them until 5pm Friday. NO ONE was permitted any kind of remote access over the weekend while we moved little stuff, migrated the main servers, brought everything online, and tested it all. There was almost $2k in last minute hardware procurements that weekend as an entire TV placement in the kitchen was overlooked and the desktops all lacked blue-tooth capabilities we needed for the headsets. Best laid plans they say...

MOVE-IN: Tuesday following Memorial weekend where my IT staff and I had spent 3 14-16 hour days moving, installing, testing, and inspecting stuff actually went pretty well. We were missing a day's data from our large file server that was easily recovered from a later snapshot. I'm still not sure how the virtual machine clone lacked that when the rest were perfect. There was a minor issue with the Adobe Acrobat Reader installs for the few folk that only used that and some other peripheral related issues as folk came in, rearranged their equipment, and broke stuff. All in all, a very soft landing.

EPILOGUE: I know this was very broad strokes, but for something I spent most of the last 7 months working on, believe me when I say the detailed version is a book on it's own. At the end of it all, I had similar experiences migrating organizations in the past that I could pull on to help put this together, but this was probably the most complex move over the shortest move period. We did get nice, bright new spaces in a campus styled building with modern access controls and covered parking, so win-win. Heck, I even got a window in my office for the first time in 10 years.