Bristol IT Company merged with MDS Technologies to become Assured Digital Technologies in April 2020.

Background

One of our local recruitment companies is a highly respected and rapidly-growing expert in IT specialist and executive recruitment.

Bristol IT Company provided their headquarters IT services and support for many years. The company has expanded rapidly, and at the time of writing is now operating from six offices internationally, on four continents.

Challenge

As they have needed progressively larger premises, their Bristol headquarters has gone through a number of reorganisations and office moves. Obviously, with a global business they can’t afford any significant downtime, so moves have had to be expertly planned and brilliantly executed. Bristol IT had responsibility for the technical aspects of the task. One of the office moves was more “interesting” than most. The new premises were in the same building as before, Castlemead, in the centre of Bristol. This fact made a rather daring plan possible.

Solution

The staff took a long lunch break (only two hours though), and returned afterwards to a totally different office, on a different floor of the building. During lunch, Bristol IT Company worked to move all the equipment, including the servers and the crucial Internet access point. The PCs were set up on new desks, but otherwise configured just as they had been left.

Result

We might have made it look easy, but the reality was a lot of diligent planning and testing. Such a quick move became possible when the building management found they could make the new office space available for a few days ahead of the move. Locations of desks and facilities were carefully planned jointly, by the recruitment company’s Operations Manager, the office furniture people, and Bristol IT Company—we covered all the technical facilities.

We had time to test and prove (and properly label!) all the structured wiring in the new space, for both networking and the phone system. So, by the time we brought the kit in, we had a plan detailing exactly where everything should be plugged, what cabling was needed and so on, and, crucially, once the equipment was in its new locations, we had known-good sockets to plug into.

So after “lunch” everything worked, exactly as it should. There were no IT issues arising from the move, none whatsoever.

Needless to say, the company were very pleased… and got straight back to work!