It wasn’t a big change and so we didn’t expect anything to go wrong. How wrong we were!
The change was merging two small office locations into one. Compared to previous office moves we had managed this was one was small. And yet it threw us a few nasty surprises that could have been avoided. For example:
- The move was on a Thursday. We weren’t back online until the Monday. No emails, no client files, no internet access. It was like working 30 years ago!
- The business phones weren’t transferred to the new location until a week after the move, requiring us to pick up messages from the old location. We can only hope we didn’t miss your message.
- The furniture in one of the new offices did not fit! Much juggling was required and two people were crammed into the space for one. Rearranging and replacing the furniture eventually fixed the situation.
- For a while we were working out of two locations. So when we needed a file it always seemed to be at the “other”location.
And I won’t even discuss what the change in travel patterns did to us! And just as everything was settling down our new computers arrived! It was all eventually fixed but with a bit more planning and preparation we could have avoided most, if not all, of the disruptions.
This experience got me thinking. As business owners we are all change agents. We create new products. We persuade new clients to buy our products. We implement new systems and processes. We build businesses. All of our work requires the management of change. And so in the next few blogs we will explore change and focus on how we can successful manage change and minimize the inevitable disruption the change causes.
Next week we look at how to manage the risk of change. We use a powerful tool aptly called Managing Risk. Yes you are right; we should have used it for our office move!
