Fitting out a new office: the order matters more than the budget

We are usually called about a new office at one of two moments. The good one is when the lease is signed and the walls are not up. The expensive one is the week before people move in, when everything is painted and somebody has realised there is nowhere to put a cabinet. The work is the same. The price and the disruption are not.

The first decision is where the comms room goes, and it should be made before the layout is finalised. It needs to be roughly central, because cable runs are limited in length and the room position decides whether the far corner of the floor is reachable. It needs power, some ventilation, and a door that locks. It does not need to be large. A cupboard chosen for being useless for anything else is often exactly right, as long as it is in the middle rather than at the end.

Second, order the internet line early. This is the single longest lead time in the whole project and the one nobody controls: a new fibre connection may need a survey, a way leave from a landlord, and a crew. Everything else can be compressed into a week. This cannot, and an office that is otherwise ready but has no line is a fully staffed team using phone hotspots.

Third, cable while the ceiling is open. Every run is cheap now and expensive later, and the list should include the things that are not desks: ceiling access points, cameras, door readers, the printer, the boardroom screen, the reception till. Add spare runs to each area. The cost of a spare cable during a fit-out is close to nothing and the cost of adding one afterwards is a day and a mess.

Fourth, decide power before you decide hardware. Which sockets are on backup, and for how long? At minimum the comms room should ride through an outage, because a network that dies with the lights takes the phones, the cameras and the door system with it. That is a small calculation and it changes what you buy.

Fifth, put the security in before the furniture. Cameras, the alarm and the door readers all want the same open ceiling the cabling wanted, and they want it before there are desks underneath to work around.

Only then the things everyone starts with: the Wi-Fi design, the machines, the printers, the accounts. Those are days of work, not weeks, and they go smoothly on a site where the first five were done in order.

The through line is that the cheap window is while the building is empty and open, and it closes on the day the ceiling tiles go in. Nearly everything expensive about a fit-out is work done after that day which could have been done before it.