Case Study 3: Moving the Corporate Infrastructure What is probably a universal truth is that from the moment humankind began to form businesses, moving the business was a major pain. Before there were ever terms like corporate infrastructure, it still meant packing everything up, moving it, unpacking it, and getting set back up to do business as soon as possible.   Today you take that pain, and give it 2 ratchet turns to the right because: 7 x 24 Expectation: Our culture has come to expect that every business is available any time day or night. Outages while you move are simply unacceptable.   Reliance on Information Technology: Every employee at every company relies on their computers and connectivity to the systems they need to perform their work. To a large extent: No Systems. No Work.   Relocating a business, particularly a high tech business means you have to plan, plan, plan. You have to build contingencies into the plan. You have to stage things carefully. The dominoes have to be lined up in a row, so that as the first one falls the rest fall in an exact and precise sequential pattern.   I have managed 4 major corporate IT relocations. Keys to a successful move strategy are as follows: What kind of interruption to the business can your organization live with? Based on this establish a budget for the project. Always understand the technological heart of your organization. Without this your organization cannot live. Stage that heart; duplicating hardware if the need be, in the new location. Have a working communications infrastructure at the new location before you move. Try to avoid flash cuts as this eliminates a number of possible problems and allows debugging efforts to be focused on system problems. Stage the move whenever possible. Try to avoid moving the whole organization all at the same time unless the organization is quite small. No matter how well planned, problems will still occur. Have an automated system in place to work issues (e.g. Help Desk) once the move is underway. Maintain an organized punch list of problems to be worked. Understand what key corporate projects and milestones will occur during the move period. Manage around those priorities. Be prepared to have no one be grateful. Except those that execute the move, no one understands the Herculean effort required to make it come off smoothly. There will be many sharing the view of: the glass is half empty. Do all you can to personally reward everyone who helped complete the move.