An office move fails on governance rather than on logistics. Somebody has to own the date, somebody has to own the budget, and somebody has to own the decision about which desk goes where, and in most businesses those three people are the same overworked person with a day job. A project plan exists to make that explicit rather than assumed.
What follows is a structure you can copy into a spreadsheet or a project tool: the workstreams, who owns each, the dependencies that determine the critical path, and the decision points that need signing off before the next stage can start.
Summary: Build the plan around six workstreams: property and legal, fit-out, IT and connectivity, the physical move, people and communications, and the exit from the old space. Connectivity has the longest lead time and therefore sets the date. Name a single accountable owner and give them authority to make decisions, not just to chase.
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The six workstreams and who owns them
| Workstream | Typical owner | Key deliverables | Starts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Property and legal | Finance director or MD | Heads of terms, lease, dilapidations assessment, licence for alterations | Earliest |
| Fit-out and design | Operations, with a designer | Space plan, specification, contractor appointment, snagging | After heads of terms |
| IT and connectivity | IT lead or provider | Circuits ordered, comms room survey, cabling, cutover plan | Week the lease is signed |
| Physical move | Operations or facilities | Removals survey, crate delivery, move schedule, access permits | 8 to 12 weeks out |
| People and comms | HR or internal comms | Announcements, consultation, travel impact, FAQs, desk allocation | As early as possible |
| Exit from old space | Finance with facilities | Notice served, dilapidations settled, keys returned, utilities closed | Aligned to lease dates |
The people workstream is the one businesses consistently under-resource, and it is the one staff judge the whole move on. A relocation that adds twenty minutes to half the team’s commute is a retention issue, and finding that out after the lease is signed is too late to do anything about it.
Assign one accountable owner overall, not a committee. Committees are good at reviewing and poor at deciding, and an office move generates a decision roughly every day for three months.
The critical path, and what sits on it
Connectivity is almost always the longest lead item, frequently many weeks for a leased line. Everything else can be compressed with money or effort. A circuit cannot, which means the installation date effectively sets your move date rather than the other way round. Order circuits the week the lease is signed, before the fit-out is designed and before the removals are quoted.
- Leased line or dedicated fibre. Weeks to months. The critical path item.
- Licence for alterations. Required from the landlord before fit-out works start, and routinely forgotten until it delays the contractor.
- Long-lead furniture. Bespoke joinery and specified seating can run to many weeks.
- Number porting. Completing on a fixed date that is hard to move.
- Mechanical and electrical works. Particularly in older buildings where nothing is where the drawings say.
- Dilapidations negotiation. Start before serving notice, since the assessment informs whether to move at all.
The licence for alterations catches people out repeatedly, and the law is more helpful than most tenants realise. Section 19(2) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1927 provides that where a lease requires consent for improvements, that consent must not be unreasonably withheld, although the landlord may require payment of a reasonable sum for damage to the premises and for its legal and surveying expenses.
The distinction that matters is between improvements and other alterations. Works that improve the premises from the tenant’s point of view attract that protection; works that do not may be prohibited outright by the lease with no obligation on the landlord to consider them. Get the lease read on this point before the space plan is drawn, not after a contractor is booked.
Either way, obtaining consent involves the landlord’s surveyor and solicitor and takes time nobody budgets for. Raise it at heads of terms. Our guide to IT relocation covers the connectivity and cutover detail, and office relocation costs covers the budget side.
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A twelve-week outline you can adapt
Twelve weeks is a realistic minimum for a small to mid-sized office where the space needs a fit-out. Six months is more comfortable, and anything under eight weeks means accepting compromises on either the fit-out or the connectivity. Scale the outline below with headcount, floor area and how much building work is involved.
Weeks 12 to 10. Lease signed, connectivity ordered, comms room surveyed, project owner appointed and budget approved. Dilapidations assessment commissioned on the old space. First announcement to staff, because rumours travel faster than plans.
Weeks 10 to 8. Space plan agreed and signed off. Fit-out contractor appointed. Licence for alterations applied for. Removals companies surveyed and quoted. Furniture audit completed, deciding what moves and what is replaced or disposed of.
Weeks 8 to 4. Fit-out works underway. Cabling and comms room build. Number porting arranged. Move date confirmed and communicated. Access arrangements agreed with both buildings, including lift bookings, out-of-hours permission and parking or bay suspensions.
Weeks 4 to 1. Crates delivered and labelling scheme issued. Staff clear desks and archive or shred what is not moving. New site network tested with real devices. Address changes started across statutory and operational systems. Snagging list run on the fit-out.
Move weekend and week one. Decommission, transport, install, test with departmental representatives on the Sunday, and have IT and facilities physically present on the Monday morning. Then the old space: clear, clean, dilapidations settled, keys returned.
Tracking it without a project tool
A spreadsheet with six columns handles this perfectly well for a small business: task, workstream, owner, due date, status, and what it is blocked by. The last column is the one that makes it a project plan rather than a list.
Businesses frequently buy project software for a relocation and then track the real work in email anyway. The tool matters far less than having one shared document that everybody looks at and one person who updates it.
Meet weekly for thirty minutes with the workstream owners, and run the meeting off the blocked column rather than going through every task. What is stuck, who owns unblocking it, and by when. Status reporting on things that are progressing normally wastes the time you need for the things that are not.
Keep a decisions log alongside it, recording what was decided, by whom and when. Office moves generate a lot of verbal agreements between people who then remember them differently, particularly around who agreed to pay for what.
The decisions that need signing off
Plans usually list activities and then stall on choices nobody has authority to make, so it is worth separating the decisions out and naming who owns each one.
| Decision | Who signs it off | Blocked until | Cost of delay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Move or renegotiate the existing lease | Board or MD | Dilapidations assessment received | Everything |
| Space plan and desk count | MD with department heads | Headcount forecast agreed | Fit-out cannot start |
| Fit-out specification | Budget holder | Space plan signed | Contractor cannot price |
| What furniture moves | Operations | Space plan signed | Removals cannot be quoted accurately |
| Move date | Project owner | Connectivity date confirmed | Everything downstream |
| Phased or single move | Project owner with IT | Space readiness known | Lease overlap costs |
The headcount forecast is an unusually early dependency and an uncomfortable one, because it forces a conversation about growth plans that businesses often prefer to defer. Everything about the space plan, and therefore the fit-out and the lease length, follows from it.
Dilapidations, and why the number arrives first
A schedule of dilapidations is an opening position, not a bill. Section 18(1) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1927 caps damages for breach of a repairing covenant at the amount by which the value of the landlord’s reversion is diminished by the disrepair, and bars damages altogether where the premises are to be demolished or so structurally altered that the repairs would be valueless.
That statutory cap is the reason a claim and a settlement are frequently very different figures, and the reason a surveyor acting for the tenant earns their fee. If the landlord intends to strip the space for the next occupier, the works you are being asked to pay for may add nothing to the value of the building.
The sequencing point follows from that. Commission the assessment before deciding to move at all, because a business that has already committed has given up its negotiating position with the existing landlord. The dilapidations number is an input to the move-or-stay decision, not a consequence of it.
Budget for it as a real line rather than a contingency. It is one of the largest costs in an office move and the one most often discovered late.
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The obligations that sit outside the plan
Several statutory duties attach to occupying a new workplace and none appear on a typical move plan. On fire, GOV.UK guidance on workplace fire safety sets out that the responsible person must carry out and regularly review a fire risk assessment, tell staff about the risks identified, put appropriate safety measures in place and plan for an emergency.
- Fire risk assessment. For the new premises, with evacuation routes, assembly point and named fire wardens.
- First aid. Based on a first-aid needs assessment rather than a fixed headcount ratio, since HSE guidance on first aid at work requires adequate and appropriate equipment, facilities and people for your particular circumstances.
- Accessibility. Reasonable adjustments for staff and visitors, considered at the space planning stage rather than afterwards.
- Display screen equipment. Workstation assessments for a new layout, particularly if desks or monitors have changed.
- Insurance. Employers liability, contents and business interruption all need updating to the new address.
- Statutory address changes. Companies House, HMRC and the ICO register where applicable.
The first aid point is worth stating precisely because businesses often look for a magic number of first aiders per employee. There is not one. The duty is to assess what your workplace actually needs, taking account of the hazards present, the size of the site and how spread out people are, which for a new layout is a genuinely different answer from the old one.
Add these as a seventh workstream rather than assuming somebody will pick them up. They are unglamorous, they carry legal weight, and they are exactly the sort of thing that gets forgotten when everybody is focused on the fit-out and the date.
Where plans go wrong
The commonest failure is a plan with no owner, where every workstream is assigned to a department and nobody holds the whole thing. The second is a plan that tracks tasks but not dependencies, so a delay in one place is not visible until it has already moved the date.
A project plan is not a task list. The value is in the dependencies: knowing that the fit-out cannot start without the licence for alterations, which cannot be applied for without the space plan, which cannot be agreed without the headcount forecast. Written as a flat list of tasks, that chain is invisible until it breaks.
Contingency is the other omission. Ten to twenty percent on the fit-out budget, weighted higher for older buildings, and two to four weeks of lease overlap. Both get cut first in planning and both are needed in practice, and a plan with no float turns every small delay into a crisis.
Communication failures are the most visible. Staff who learn about a move from a contractor measuring their desk have already formed a view about how the business treats them. Announce early, be honest about what is not yet decided, and give people a route to raise concerns about travel and access.
Finally, do not let the plan stop at the move date. The exit from the old space, the dilapidations settlement and the address changes across every system all sit after the exciting part and all cost money if neglected. Our guide to the office relocation checklist covers the operational detail, and business archiving covers what to do with the paperwork before it travels.
Consider a phased move if the business can support it. Moving a department at a time over two or three weekends reduces the risk of a single catastrophic weekend, gives you a chance to correct problems before the bulk of staff arrive, and keeps some capability running throughout. Against that, it extends the period of disruption, splits teams temporarily and costs more in lease overlap and coordination. Below about thirty people a single weekend move is generally simpler.
How EcoGreen Movers fits into the plan
We survey the space before quoting rather than pricing from a desk count, because access, lift availability and out-of-hours requirements change the figure far more than floor area does. EcoGreen Movers works to a sequence your IT provider sets and brings reusable crates rather than cardboard, which removes a disposal line from the budget.
Two workstreams we can take off the plan entirely. The furniture audit usually produces desks, chairs and cabinets that do not suit the new space, and we handle disposal and clearance alongside the move rather than leaving it as a separate procurement. And where the fit-out is not finished when the lease on the old space expires, our storage covers the gap, which is usually cheaper than an extended overlap on two commercial rents.
We handle office removals and commercial relocation nationwide, including London and Manchester. Bring us in at the survey stage rather than four weeks out, and get in touch for a quote.
Whatever structure you choose, write down what success looks like before you start. For most businesses it is straightforward: staff working normally on the first Monday, no customer-visible disruption, the budget held, and the old space handed back without a dispute. Four measures, agreed at the outset, keep a project honest when the pressure to compromise arrives in week nine.
Build the budget alongside the plan rather than after it. Every workstream carries cost, and the ones businesses forget are the least visible: dilapidations on the old space, the licence for alterations and the landlord’s professional fees that come with it, IT cabling, and the overlap period where two rents run at once. Assign a budget holder per workstream with a spending limit and an escalation point above it, because requiring every small unbudgeted decision to reach the MD is what turns a three-month project into a five-month one.
Frequently asked questions
How long should the plan run?
Twelve weeks is a realistic minimum where the space needs a fit-out, and six months is more comfortable. Anything shorter means compromising on either the fit-out specification or the connectivity, since neither can be genuinely accelerated.
Who should own it?
One named person with authority to decide, not a committee and not someone who can only chase. In a small business that is usually operations or the MD. Workstream leads report to them, but accountability for the date and the budget sits in one place.
What sets the move date?
Connectivity, in almost every case. A leased line can take many weeks and cannot be compressed, so the installation date determines when the business can operate from the new space. Order circuits the week the lease is signed.
Can a landlord refuse consent for alterations?
It depends what the works are. Section 19(2) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1927 provides that where a lease requires consent for improvements, that consent must not be unreasonably withheld, though the landlord may require a reasonable sum for damage to the premises and for its legal and surveying expenses. Alterations that are not improvements may be prohibited absolutely by the lease.
Is a dilapidations claim capped?
Yes. Section 18(1) of the same Act caps damages for breach of a repairing covenant at the amount by which the value of the landlord’s reversion is diminished, and bars them altogether where the premises are to be demolished or structurally altered so that the repairs would be valueless. Treat a schedule as an opening position and take surveying advice.
What contingency should be built in?
Ten to twenty percent of the fit-out budget, weighted towards the higher end for older buildings, plus two to four weeks of lease overlap. Both are cut first in planning and needed in practice, and a plan with no float turns minor delays into crises.
Run a short review a month after the move, while the detail is fresh. What was underestimated, what the contingency was actually spent on, and which supplier performed. Most businesses relocate again eventually, and an hour of honest notes is worth more to the next project than any generic template.
In summary: one owner, six workstreams, circuits first
Structure the plan around property, fit-out, IT, the move, people and the exit, with a single accountable owner rather than a committee. Order connectivity the week the lease is signed, because that date sets everything else.
Track dependencies rather than tasks, get the dilapidations assessment before committing to move at all, and carry real contingency in both budget and time. Then keep the plan running past the move date until the old space is handed back.
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