Opening a Second Office: The IT Runbook

The IT work for a new office is not difficult. It is a scheduling problem dressed as a technical one, and the thing that goes wrong is almost always the same: the circuit was ordered too late.

Everything else can be compressed. Connectivity cannot.

Twelve weeks out: order connectivity

Business internet installation is measured in weeks to months, not days. Fibre to a building without existing service can require construction, permits and landlord coordination. Nothing in this list matters if the circuit is not ordered first.

• Check what is actually available at the address. Do not assume from the neighbourhood. Ask carriers for a serviceability check on the specific suite.
• Order the primary circuit. Business-grade with an SLA, static IPs if you need them.
• Order a second circuit from a different carrier, ideally over different physical infrastructure. Two providers reselling the same fibre is not redundancy.
• Confirm the demarcation point and who runs cable from there to your space. This is a frequent gap between carrier and landlord responsibilities, and it is discovered late.
• Get the landlord's requirements in writing — riser access, approved contractors, work hours, insurance.

If the building has no suitable service and construction is required, this is where a three-month delay comes from. Finding out in week ten is how an opening date slips.

Ten weeks out: the decisions that are expensive later

How does this office connect to the rest of the business? If applications are cloud-hosted, often it simply uses the internet, with identity doing the work. If there are on-premises systems, you need site-to-site connectivity — and that choice shapes the equipment order.

Does anything need to live here? The modern default is no: no server, no local file storage, no local directory. Every system that lives in a branch office is a system someone must maintain in a building with no IT staff. Keep it to network equipment and endpoints unless there is a specific reason.

Wi-Fi design, not Wi-Fi guesswork. Get a floor plan and have access point placement designed against it, accounting for construction materials. Glass-walled meeting rooms and solid-core walls change the answer. Guessing produces dead spots you then fix expensively with the office occupied.

Cabling. Order the structured cabling now — more drops than you think you need, to a labelling standard, terminated in a comms room with power and ventilation. Adding cable after fit-out costs many times more than adding it during.

Eight weeks out: order hardware

Lead times on network equipment vary and have been unpredictable. Order early:

• firewall or edge device, sized for the circuit and the user count
• switches with enough PoE ports for access points, phones and cameras, with headroom
• access points per the design
• UPS for the comms rack
• rack, patch panels, cable management

Order endpoints — laptops, monitors, docks, headsets, handsets — at the same time, and have them imaged and enrolled centrally before they ship to the new site. A device that arrives already managed is a ten-minute setup; one that arrives blank is an afternoon.

Six weeks out: telephony and address records

• Order numbers for the new location, or plan the port if an existing business is moving
• Configure call flows for the site: routing, out-of-hours, the directory
• Set emergency calling addresses for the new location, including suite and floor — this is a legal requirement and a common omission at new sites
• Update the address everywhere it will need to appear: Google Business Profile, directories, website, invoices, letterhead

Four weeks out: physical and access

• Door access and alarm systems, and whether they need network or analogue lines
• Cameras, with a decision about where footage is stored and for how long
• Printers and multifunction devices, with scan-to-destination configured and secured
• Meeting room AV, tested with the actual conferencing platform people use

Two weeks out: build and test on site

The comms room gets built, cabling tested, circuit confirmed live, and equipment configured. Then test properly, before anyone depends on it:

• speed, jitter and packet loss on both circuits
• failover tested by physically unplugging the primary — not by reading the configuration
• Wi-Fi survey walking the actual floor, including the corners nobody designed for
• a test call from a handset and a softphone, checking emergency location
• printing, scanning, and meeting room AV
• access to every business application from a new device

Opening week

Have someone technical on site for the first two days. Issues at a new office are concentrated in the first 48 hours and most are five-minute fixes if someone is there — and day-long frustrations if nobody is.

Keep a list of what comes up. It is the most accurate documentation you will ever get of what the office actually needs.

The three that cause the most pain

The circuit ordered late. Everything else can be compressed; this cannot. Order it first, before the lease is even signed if possible.

Cabling done cheaply. Too few drops, poor labelling, no documentation. Every future change costs more, forever.

No redundancy because the office is small. A single circuit means the office stops when it fails. A modest secondary connection — even a cellular failover — is cheap relative to a day of a dozen people unable to work.

What not to build

Resist the instinct to replicate head office. A second site usually does not need its own server, its own domain controller, its own file storage or its own backup system. Each of those is an asset somebody must maintain in a building with no IT staff, and in most modern environments it buys nothing.

Network, endpoints, identity, and good connectivity. That is the office.