Planning an Office Move in Hong Kong: The IT Timeline

Most office moves in Hong Kong do not slip because someone forgot to order switches. They slip because a building manager would not approve riser works until a form was resubmitted, or because the only goods-lift slot left in the week of the move was Tuesday at 6am, or because a fibre circuit that was ordered late arrived three weeks after everyone had already sat down.

None of those are technology problems. They are scheduling problems that happen to land on the technology scope, and they are almost entirely predictable. This is the timeline we work back from on a Hong Kong office relocation — what has to happen when, who has to approve it, and which items will quietly eat your float if you leave them.

The short version of the timeline

Every move is different, and a small single-floor move compresses everything below. But the order rarely changes, and the sequence matters more than the absolute dates.

When	What has to happen	Why it is here and not later
Lease signed	Order internet circuits. Start the technical survey of both sites.	Circuits are the longest lead-time item in the whole move.
Lease + 1–2 weeks	Identify every consent the building will require, at both ends.	Approvals are the usual hidden critical path.
Before fit-out design freezes	Cabling design, containment, outlet positions, comms-room power and cooling.	After the design freezes, changes are variations.
~12 weeks out	Book goods lift, riser access and after-hours windows.	Slots are shared with every other tenant in the tower.
~8 weeks out	Wi-Fi survey of the new space; AV and meeting-room design signed off.	Both need cabling decisions that are about to be built.
~4 weeks out	Cutover runbook, rollback plan, comms to staff, freeze on scope.	The plan has to be written down while there is still time to argue with it.
Move weekend	Decommission, transport, re-rack, cutover, test.
Day one	Engineers on the floor, not on a ticket queue.	Move-day issues are small, numerous and fastest fixed in person.

Stage one: the week the lease is signed

Two things start immediately, and both are unglamorous.

Order the circuits

Internet and WAN circuits have the longest lead time of anything in a move, and the variance is wide. It depends on the carrier, the building, whether the service is fibre or copper, and — the one that catches people — whether your chosen provider already has capacity into that building. A tower with no existing presence from your carrier can add substantially to the wait, and there is no amount of project management that compensates for it.

Three rules that have saved more moves than anything else on this page:

• Order as soon as the address is confirmed, before the fit-out design, before the furniture, before anything.
• Keep the old circuit live in parallel through the cutover and for a period afterwards. The overlap cost is trivial against the cost of not having a working office.
• Have a fallback path. A temporary line, a bonded 5G service, something. A late circuit should be an inconvenience, not a reason the move does not happen.

Survey both ends

Not the new site alone — both. The old office tells you what you actually have, which is frequently not what the asset register says: the rack that was added and never documented, the four dead cables nobody dares remove, the switch someone put in a cupboard in 2019.

A survey produces the asset list, photographs, rack layouts and, most importantly, the dependency map — what has to come back up before what. That map is what the cutover sequence is built from. A Matterport 3D scan of both spaces is worth doing here if the sites are complex: it gives cablers, movers and AV installers exact dimensions of plant rooms and risers without repeat visits, and it settles arguments about what was there before.

Stage two: the approvals nobody budgets time for

This is the stage that most often decides whether the date holds, and it is almost never on the first version of the plan.

Almost every Hong Kong commercial building requires building management approval before works that affect risers, the base-building comms room, ceiling voids, power or the facade. Contractors working outside business hours usually need separate approval again. These are not formalities — they take time, they come back with questions, and they are frequently the hidden critical path on the whole programme.

What makes it harder is that the requirements are not standard. One tower wants a full method statement and insurance certificates from every contractor. Another wants drawings stamped by a registered professional. A third has a portal, a two-week turnaround and a form that rejects submissions for reasons it does not explain.

The practical approach:

1. Ask, in the survey, what consent each item needs — at both the old and new address. The old building has to approve the removal works too, and that gets forgotten.
2. Prepare the technical detail the building manager will ask for rather than waiting to be asked. Drawings, containment routes, loadings, working hours, contractor details, insurances.
3. Name one person who owns the submissions and chases them. Split ownership between the fit-out contractor, the landlord’s agent and the IT team is how a form sits unread for three weeks.

Stage three: get IT into the fit-out design before it freezes

This is the single most common cause of expensive rework, and it costs nothing to avoid.

The IT items with the longest lead times and the deepest coordination dependencies — structured cabling design, containment, comms-room power and cooling, and any AV that needs joinery, power or wall reinforcement — all have to be agreed while the fit-out is still on paper. Bring IT in late and the decisions still get made; they just get made by the architect, the M&E consultant and the main contractor, working from assumptions.

What that looks like in practice when it goes wrong:

• Containment sized for a cable count from a different project, so the cabling contractor cannot get the bundles in.
• Floor boxes positioned to the furniture plan that existed two revisions ago.
• A comms room with a single power feed, no dedicated cooling and a door that a rack will not fit through.
• Meeting rooms with beautiful joinery and nowhere to put a codec, no power at the display and no cable route to the table.

None of that is anyone’s fault individually. It is the predictable result of technology being treated as a shopping list at the end rather than a design discipline from the start — the same argument we make at more length in how to plan technology for an office fit-out, and the reason structured cabling deserves a design rather than a price.

Stage four: goods lifts, risers and the calendar

Service and goods lifts in Hong Kong towers are shared across every tenant fitting out at the same time. For a large move, slots can be genuinely scarce — particularly at month end and quarter end, when several tenants are working to the same lease dates. The same applies to riser access for new cabling.

This constrains the schedule far more than most people expect, and it is not negotiable by wanting it more. The move plan has to be built around the windows you can actually book, rather than around the windows you would like. Confirm them during the survey, book early, and treat a lost slot as a schedule event rather than a detail.

Two related constraints worth knowing about before they surprise you:

• Some buildings restrict which hours contractors may work at all, and which lift they may use. A weekend cutover is not automatically permitted just because the office is empty.
• Both ends need booking. The old building has to let you take equipment out on the same night the new building lets you bring it in.

Stage five: Wi-Fi, AV and the things people judge you on

Nobody walks into a new office and admires the cabling. They notice the Wi-Fi dropping in the corner where the sales team sits, and the meeting room that takes twenty minutes to start a call.

Survey the wireless before you move in. Designing Wi-Fi from a floor plan alone is guesswork, because coverage depends on the building materials, the fit-out and the neighbouring networks — none of which are on the drawing. A survey-led design gets access-point placement, roaming and capacity right the first time, rather than after the desks are full and the complaints have started. Our Wi-Fi design page covers how that survey works.

Sign off the meeting rooms early. Room technology needs cabling, power and often joinery coordination, all of which are fit-out decisions. Decide how many rooms you need and what each is genuinely for — a huddle room and a board room are not the same problem — and get the design in before the walls close. If the estate is large enough to need consistency across floors or cities, that is a room-standards exercise, not a purchasing one.

Stage six: the cutover

By this point the plan should be boring. A successful relocation is a runbook, not a gamble.

The cutover itself typically runs overnight or across a weekend, so people finish at the old office and start normally at the new one. What makes that work is sequencing: systems come back in dependency order, fallback options stay open until each piece is proven, and somebody has written down who decides to roll back and at what time.

Be honest about the exceptions. Some services have an unavoidable switchover window — a circuit change, or a server that has to be physically moved and cannot be in two places. Those should be identified and communicated in the plan, not discovered on the night. Where a clean single cutover is not realistic, phase it.

For anything heavier than desks — a server room or a comms room move — the tolerances tighten. Rack elevations, a written shutdown and startup sequence, anti-static packing, documented port maps, and power-up in dependency order at the far end. If racks are moving into or out of a colocation facility, the data centre operator has its own access rules, permitted-works windows and change process, and those gates are usually booked further ahead than a landlord’s. We cover that scope on the office and data centre relocation page.

Stage seven: day one, and the old office

Put engineers on the floor. Move-day problems are usually small and numerous — a docking station, a printer queue, a meeting room that will not join first time — and they are resolved far faster by someone already in the building than by a ticket queue. Plan for hypercare through go-live and into the first full working day.

Then hand over properly. As-builts, port maps, rack elevations and a clean operational baseline, given to whoever runs day-two support — your team, or ours. A move is the one moment when the documentation is accurate; it is worth capturing while it still is.

And do not forget the space you are leaving. Dilapidation obligations are routinely more extensive than tenants expect, and much cheaper to plan for than to rush. That normally means removing the equipment you are taking, securely disposing of or recycling what you are not — with drive destruction and certificates where data is involved — and reinstating whatever the lease requires. Read the dilapidation clause early, not in the last fortnight.

The mistakes that cost the most

• Starting IT planning after the fit-out design is fixed. Everything downstream becomes a variation.
• Assuming the fit-out contractor owns the technology scope. They own the parts of it in their contract, which is rarely all of it, and the gaps between trades are where move-day failures live.
• Ordering circuits late. The one item nothing else can compensate for.
• Booking the move date before checking lift and riser availability. The tower’s calendar does not care about yours.
• Skipping the wireless survey because there is a floor plan.
• Leaving dilapidation to the end, then paying a premium to rush it.
• Having no named owner for the technology scope across the fit-out contractor, the landlord, the movers and the IT team.

Office move IT FAQs

How far in advance should we start planning the IT side of an office move?

Start as soon as the new lease is signed, and before the fit-out design is fixed. The IT items with the longest lead times — internet circuits, structured cabling design and any AV that needs joinery or power coordination — all have to be agreed while the fit-out is still on paper. Bringing IT in late is the single most common reason a move slips, because cabling and containment decisions get made by others and then have to be undone. If the move is already close, tell us the date and we will work back from it and tell you honestly what is achievable.

Do we need landlord or building management approval for IT works?

Almost always, yes. Most Hong Kong commercial buildings require building management approval before any works affecting risers, the base-building comms room, ceiling voids, power or the facade — and separate approval again for contractors working out of hours. Approvals take time and are frequently the hidden critical path. Identify what needs consent during the survey, prepare the technical detail the building manager asks for, and coordinate with the landlord, fit-out contractor and project manager so nothing stalls waiting on a form.

How long do new internet circuits take to provision?

Longer than almost anything else, so order them first. Lead times vary considerably by carrier, building and whether the service is fibre or copper, and a building without existing capacity from your chosen provider can add substantially to the wait. Order as soon as the address is confirmed, keep the old circuit live in parallel through the cutover, and have a fallback path so a late circuit does not become a late move.

Can the move happen outside business hours?

Yes, and most cutovers should. The decommission, transport and rebuild are planned around your operating hours, with the critical cutover typically running overnight or across a weekend so staff arrive to a working office. Bear in mind that after-hours access usually needs to be booked with building management in advance at both the old and new address, and some buildings restrict which hours contractors may work or use the service lift.

How much downtime should we expect?

The aim is that people finish work at the old office and start normally at the new one. The cutover is sequenced so the systems people depend on come back in the right order, fallback options stay open, and the move is phased where a clean single cutover is not realistic. Some services do have an unavoidable switchover window — a circuit change, or a server that has to be physically moved — and those should be flagged up front rather than discovered on the night.

What happens to the equipment and cabling in the old office?

Controlled shutdown, labelling and packing, plus dilapidation support so handing the space back does not become a last-minute scramble. That normally means removing the equipment you are taking, disposing of or recycling what you are not — with secure drive destruction and certificates where data is involved — and reinstating what the lease requires. Check your dilapidation obligations early; they are often more extensive than tenants expect.

Who should own the technology scope during a move?

One named party, accountable from planning through go-live. The common failure is a scope split between the fit-out contractor, the AV installer, the cabling contractor and the internal IT team, where each assumes another has covered an interface. Whether that owner is internal or a consultant, what matters is that a single person can answer for cabling, network, AV, security and the cutover together.

Talk to us about your move

PTS has been moving offices and servers across Hong Kong, Mainland China and Singapore since 2001, and we are ISO 27001 and ISO 20000 certified. We ran the Hong Kong and Singapore relocations for a global law firm and the technology design for a 250,000 sq ft corporate fit-out.

The earlier we see the floor plan, the more options you have. Tell us the address and the target date, and we will tell you what is achievable — see office relocations for how the engagement works, or the new office IT setup checklist if you are building the new space from scratch.