Office Relocation Checklist for Dubai Businesses

An office move is judged on one thing: whether people sit down and work on the first morning. Everything else is invisible if the answer is no.

And the thing that most often makes the answer no is not the furniture, the crew or the truck. It is the internet circuit at the new address, ordered too late.

Twelve weeks before

• Order the internet circuit at the new office. Do this the week you sign the lease. Business connections in Dubai can take two to three months to provision, and no amount of moving competence compensates for a dead circuit on Sunday morning.
• Confirm the fit-out schedule — power, data points, partitions. The move date depends on this being finished, not started.
• Appoint one internal move coordinator. One person, named. Office moves fail when three people each assume another is handling something.

Eight weeks before

• Get the new floor plan finalised and number every desk position on it. This becomes your labelling scheme.
• Book the mover after a site visit to both offices.
• Confirm out-of-hours access at both towers. Commercial buildings in Business Bay and Jumeirah Lake Towers (JLT) usually prefer weekend moves and may require them.
• Decide what is not going. Old furniture, dead IT, files past retention. Disposal is cheaper folded into the move than handled separately afterwards.

Four weeks before

• Circulate seat numbers to staff. Everyone should know their new desk number before the move.
• Brief your IT provider and agree the boundary explicitly: who moves the hardware, who racks it, who commissions the network.
• Apply for building permits and goods-lift bookings at both towers.
• Order crates — one per person for desk contents, plus numbered crates for filing.
• Update the address on your trade licence, with the bank, with clients and on Google.

Two weeks before

• Confirm the internet circuit is live at the new address. If it is not, this is the moment to escalate — not the week of the move.
• Distribute crates and labels. Each person packs their own desk into their own numbered crate.
• Photograph the server rack and cabling before anything is touched.
• Confirm the move sequence in writing with the mover: what moves when, and in what order.

The final week

• Staff pack their desks — personal items, stationery, anything not fixed.
• Label everything: monitors, docks, chairs, pedestals, all to a seat number.
• Seal and number the filing crates, in shelf order. Confidential material is sealed at source and opened only by your own staff.
• Back everything up. Twice.
• Confirm arrival times with the mover and the IT provider.

Move night or weekend

• IT shuts down and disconnects in the agreed sequence.
• Workstations dismantled, everything loaded, labelled by seat.
• At the new office: furniture placed by seat number first, then IT reconnected desk by desk.
• Filing crates unloaded to the right shelves in the right order.
• Your IT provider commissions the network while the furniture is being placed, not afterwards.
• Test a sample of desks before anybody stands down. Not all of them — a representative few, on different switches.

First morning

• Have the mover on site as people arrive, for the things a floor plan never quite predicts.
• Have IT on site for the same reason.
• Keep a fault list in one place rather than in fifteen separate messages.
• Arrange crate collection for the following week.

How long it takes

Where the mover stops and IT starts

Worth agreeing explicitly and in writing, because this boundary is where office moves get vague.

The mover disconnects, transports, reconnects and cable-manages desk hardware — screens, docks, printers, peripherals — and moves and racks servers and network equipment.

Your IT provider commissions the network, configures the switches and validates the circuit.

Anyone offering to do both should be asked which of their people is doing the second part.

Related

office moving covers how we run these. If there is a stockroom or warehouse attached, warehouse moving.