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You can’t manage a business move on your own and apart from needing all your staff to pull together to get things done, you will need their help with specific tasks at particular times.

Having said this, people generally don’t like change, so how you communicate with your staff, clients and suppliers will be critical. It is important not to allow rumours about a move to start before you are ready to make an announcement they may needlessly unsettle your staff.

In the early planning stages and before your plans are finalised, you should only involve other people when it is essential to do so.

Your Team

At the appropriate time you will need to appoint a team of key staff members. This team should be familiar to your business and have a good understanding of all the issues and tasks to be tackled across all the departments.
Initially this should be a small team of a few senior managers to scope the project.

Project Manager

Appoint an internal project manager as soon as you can. They will be responsible for:

• Co-ordinating all the plans and arrangements
• Overseeing the move timetable
• Identifying potential problems or bottlenecks
• Keeping track of expenditure

Project team
A project team should support the project manager and take responsibility for specific aspects of the move. Guard against the team becoming too large and unwieldy but you do need to make sure all the key departments in your organisation are represented.
Project Team Members could include representatives from:

• IT
• Finance
• Human resources
• Facilities management
• Marketing
• Operations

The Chair will usually be a senior manager but not the project manager.

Team Tasks

The role of the project team is to discuss and agree:

• The move timetable
• Responsibilities
• Reporting procedures
• Deadlines and target dates.

The success of the team is essential to the smooth management of the project. Their full buy-in to the move is critical.