They say that Saturday during a major golf championship is called Moving Day. It’s when the cream rises to the top and those who might have been lucky with the weather on the first two days start to fall away. Form is temporary, class is permanent.
Right, that’s probably alienated a fair chunk of the readers who have no interest in golf. Read on though as this is where the golf connection ends.
Moving home ranks higher on the stress scale than childbirth according to a recent survey. That involves one family and two locations. Imagine moving a whole department or an entire building, or indeed a whole organisation. Just imagine how stressful that would be. Especially if you don’t use professional move project managers and leave it to a scaled-up version of a ‘man and a van’. There’s a reason why move managers help write the tenders for removal contracts and not the other way round. That’s not being elitist. That’s based on years of experience. Both have their expertise. Both have their place. But even a good removal contractor without the guidance of a good move management team can screw things up royally.
The move management planning needs to start well before the move, months and if into a new building this could be years before the first crate is loaded onto a truck. Experience tells us (and working with our own internal design teams), getting move managers early sight of space plans will allow fine tuning based on move project experience.
“Where did we pack the coffee?” might cause a few moments of panic at the new home. World-leading research cannot afford to be derailed because someone didn’t add in the packing dimensions when it came to checking whether the optical table could fit in the goods lift.
In fact, a good move manager would not just do the “measure twice, cut once” belt and braces checking. They would do an analysis well in advance as to whether it was actually the most prudent (considering a whole number of metrics) to install a new piece of kit and leave the old one to be moved, dismantled, decommissioned etc. once the new kit is up and running.
Since 2019, the SPACE move management team have delivered two high profile educational moves and are in the process of delivering their third.
Moving Forth Valley College into their new Falkirk Campus was a 10-month project that included the management of filing and storage – once an audit had been conducted and reductions achieved (no point in moving cr@p from one building to another). Everywhere was surveyed and equipment logged.
Inanimate objects are the easy part. 450 staff had to be prepared for the move, including regular communications and workshops on how the move would actually happen. The result? Zero loss of study time for students or downtime for functional departments as the move was delivered (and supervised by our team) during the 2019 Christmas break.
So far so easy you may say. While the above project was on going, the team were also commissioned to move 500 academic researchers from 15 buildings into 1 new flagship building – the Advanced Research Centre (ARC) – for the University of Glasgow. While this project was envisaged as a move project, it was as much a change project for those being moved. Again, another string to the bow of the Space Solutions team is that not only are they experts at the project management of physical moves, they understand that people are the most precious items moving from one building to another. Throw in a global pandemic and the need to be on site every day for 5-months, ensuring health & safety guidance was adhered to, and you begin to understand what was at stake during the ARC move.
In October this year the team completed the Fife College move. Another high-profile educational project, to a new college building, with c.250 staff and over ten times that number of students.
We’ve used the triptych before showing what you can sketch in 1-sec, 10-secs, or 1-min and why real-world expertise brings genuine benefit. If you don’t, it’s a big gamble that it will all be OK.
That’s a bit like organising a move and leaving it in the hands of The Chuckle Brothers. Don’t. Just don’t.
