IMAC & Projects · Case study
Chicago Headquarters Move and IMAC Program With Boston and Minneapolis Offices.
How a three-office headquarters move and IMAC program is scoped, staged, cut over and closed out with a clean asset record.
Representative scenario. Last reviewed October 2026.
Engagement profile
- Customer
- Professional services firm relocating its headquarters
- Scale
- 3 offices, about 450 endpoints, 1 headquarters move and 2 satellite programs
- Service
- IMAC & Projects
- Where
- United States
Representative scenario. This case study shows how Deploris scopes and delivers this kind of work. It does not describe a real client, and no results are claimed. Want a plan like this for your own sites? Request a quote.
Quick answer
What does this engagement look like?
An office relocation and IMAC program for a professional services firm moving its Chicago headquarters, with Boston and Minneapolis satellite offices, covers installs, moves, adds, changes and secure disposal. Deploris runs it through one engagement manager and vetted local engineers under a written scope, using move groups, labeled equipment and cutover checks. The customer receives an updated asset register, closeout reports with photos and test results, and sanitization certificates.
THE CHALLENGE
The challenge.
The firm is moving its Chicago headquarters to a new floor plate while its Boston and Minneapolis offices keep running. Staff expect to leave on a Friday and work normally on Monday, which means every workstation, docking station, monitor, printer, conference room system and badge-linked device has to arrive at a known seat, with a known network port, in a known state. The old and new leases overlap only briefly, so there is little room to correct mistakes after the move.
The move is only one part of the program. In the same period the firm is refreshing a portion of its laptops, adding seats for new hires, changing a few desks into hoteling spaces, and retiring old equipment that still holds client data. These are ordinary IMAC tasks, but when they all land on the same asset register they collide: a device can be moved, replaced and flagged for disposal in the same week. Without one owner for the sequence, the register stops matching the floor and the disposal list stops matching the register.
Constraints the plan had to respect
- Chicago building access: the new tower is expected to require a certificate of insurance naming the building owner, a booked freight elevator and loading dock window, and engineer names submitted to building management ahead of time. Out-of-hours work is limited to the windows the property manager allows.
- Boston building rules: older downtown buildings often restrict freight elevator hours and require truck loading to be arranged with the city and the property manager, so the satellite work is planned around those slots.
- Minneapolis access and weather: many downtown buildings are linked by skyways with their own access rules, and winter conditions affect how equipment is transported and how long it should acclimate before being powered on.
- Data handling: client data sits on laptops, shared drives and old multifunction printers. Equipment leaving the firm's control must be sanitized and documented, with state e-waste requirements respected by whichever recycler is used.
- Business continuity: partners and client-facing teams cannot lose a working day, so cutover is planned over a weekend with a staffed Monday morning floor walk.
HOW THE WORK RUNS
How the work is run.
- 1
Scope the program and survey each site
The engagement manager and a lead engineer walk or remotely survey all three locations and write down the scope before any work is scheduled. For Chicago, they work from the architect's floor plans and the firm's seating chart to build a spreadsheet of every seat, room and shared device, with its current and future location. They record patch panel and wall plate labels, MDF and IDF access, available outlet and cable lengths, conference room equipment, and which items are being reused versus replaced. The written scope separates the headquarters move from the Boston and Minneapolis changes so each can be approved and priced on its own terms.
- 2
Build the move plan and reconcile the asset register
Every device gets a unique asset tag and a row in a working register, then each row is matched against the firm's CMDB or asset system to find orphans, duplicates and devices that were never recorded. People are grouped into move groups by floor and department, and each group gets a color and a number that appear on carts, crates and seat labels. The plan assigns each device one of four fates: move, replace, retire or hold. That decision is what stops a retiring laptop from being shipped to the new floor, and it is signed off by the firm's IT lead before packing starts.
- 3
Stage the destination before anyone arrives
Before the weekend, engineers work in the new space to place and label docking stations and monitors at each seat, confirm every wall plate against the switch port map, and check that VLAN assignments, DHCP scopes and Wi-Fi coverage are as the network team specified. Replacement and new-hire laptops are imaged and enrolled ahead of time through the firm's management platform, such as Intune with Autopilot or Jamf, with disk encryption on and recovery keys escrowed. Printers, meeting room systems and badge readers are tested in place by their owners. Boston and Minneapolis changes are staged by local engineers against the same checklist format.
- 4
Cut over on a weekend with checked handover
On move day, engineers lift and ship equipment by move group, reading labels against the plan at pack, at the dock and at the seat, with fragile and high-value items sealed and logged. At each seat the engineer connects the device, confirms network link and authentication, checks monitors and docks, and ticks the post-move checklist with a photo of the labeled seat. Anything that fails goes onto a visible exceptions list with an owner. Local engineers in Boston and Minneapolis run their adds and changes in the same window, reporting through the same engagement manager. A Monday morning floor walk catches what users find first: wrong monitor, missing dongle, printer mapping.
- 5
Retire equipment securely and close out the record
Retired and replaced devices are collected into locked, tracked containers with tamper seals and a handover record at each transfer. Drives are sanitized to a stated method, commonly aligned with NIST SP 800-88 guidance, or destroyed where the policy requires it, and each serial number is matched to a certificate. The asset register is updated so that every move, add, change and disposal is reflected, with exceptions explained. The program closes with a structured report containing photos, test results, open items and the final register, and the engagement manager holds a short review with the firm's IT lead to agree what, if anything, stays open.
WHAT WAS PRODUCED
What the engagement delivers.
Each item links to a full guide with its scope, process and FAQs.
WHAT THE CUSTOMER ENDS UP WITH
What the customer ends up with.
- 01A reconciled asset register in which every device has a tag, a location and a recorded fate, whether moved, replaced, retired or held.
- 02Signed pre-move and post-move checklists for each seat and shared room, with photos that show the labeled result.
- 03Sanitization certificates matched by serial number to every retired device, with the chain of custody recorded.
- 04A written exceptions list with named owners and dates, so open items are visible rather than rediscovered later.
- 05One closeout package covering all three offices that the firm's IT team can keep as the baseline for future IMAC requests.
WHAT APPLIES TO YOUR PROJECT
Decisions that apply to similar projects.
Decide the fate of every device before packing starts. A move, replace, retire or hold label on each asset row is the single decision that prevents a retiring device from being shipped to the new floor and then being missing from the disposal list.
Treat building rules as part of the schedule, not as paperwork. Certificates of insurance, freight elevator bookings, engineer name lists and loading windows can decide whether a weekend cutover is possible at all, so they are requested at kickoff in every city.
Stage the destination first and label for the person, not the device. Seat labels, color-coded move groups and pre-tested ports let engineers work from a list rather than from memory, and let users see at once whether their desk is ready.
WHERE IT APPLIES
Metros in this scenario.
Local engineers in each metro, coordinated by one engagement manager. Open a metro to see local details.
QUESTIONS
Frequently asked questions.
How far in advance should an office move IT plan start?
What is the difference between an office move and IMAC work?
How does Deploris handle secure disposal during a relocation?
More case studies
Other scenarios we have planned.
QUOTE
Plan a project like this.
Share a few details and we will come back with the next steps.
Get started
Need engineers on site? Tell us where.
Tell us the sites, the scope and the timeline. We reply with a written plan.