Blog entries tagged with "moving"

As I mentioned on Friday, the others have arrived. Today was very disruptive as the boxes were first brought in (by the removalists) and then unpacked. It was pretty much all done by lunchtime at which point the small round table in the kitchen simply could not cope…

Also since it will also be a week or so until furniture arrives for the photocopier and meeting rooms we will still have to deal with the random assortment of junk in and out of boxes that is currently our stationery area…

Since the last change in the office dynamic (I am not counting the most recent arrivals as they moved into the far side of the open plan area) it has pretty much settled down and everyone is getting along. I suspect this may be because people are starting to take greater advantage of headphones and music, I know I am…

However on Monday the remainder of the people who we shared a basement floor on campus with many many months ago will be moving across on Monday. While we will outnumber them three to one in the open plan area I predict that they will be, at least at first, much more distuptive as they get the desks in the middle. ie there is no buffer and one of the two paths from my desk to anything else is through their area. That said I am being optimistic by thinking that the disruption will only last a couple of days until our routines are integrated.

Now although it won’t affect those of us in the open plan area much I suspect that those people in the smaller open plan area (three people in five desks) and the offices at the front will be in for a much bumpier ride. Why? Because the renovations are slightly incomplete (in the grand scheme it is only little things like the desks being assembled and partitions put up…) and unless it is done over the weekend (highly unlikely) it will get done while they are trying to work…

This afternoon we moved from our desks of the past eight weeks out to the new and improved™ open plan environment.

Technically we were only supposed to finish packing all of our stuff into boxes so the removalists can move them the fifteen metres on Monday morning. We would then spend between half and all of Monday unpacking at our new desks. However as the final clean of our new desks was done by mid afternoon I started a trend of simply carrying my own stuff out to my new desk and setting it up. We avoided one occupational health and safety issue by using the drawer pedestals as trolleys instead of just carrying them.

Now it will be possible to do some work when I come in on Monday instead of wasting the whole day doing what took three hours… The removalists are still coming in at 7AM on Monday as almost all of the furniture we were using is being tranferred to another department.

And here it is… my new desk:

And a closeup of my protest against the low positioning of the power outlets:

More photos from today are available.

Last friday I mentioned that we has been told that we were moving back onto campus to make room for the builders. Fortunately since then clearer heads have prevailed and while some of us have to move back to campus it will be the team who looks after a certain product for the university. This does still mean that the people in the same office as me will be moving… just to the office next door.

The ironic thing is that three of us still have to pack everything up in boxes as if we were moving a long distance as we will be in on a training course in the city when the removalists come on Thursday…

The implementation of the office plan that we were shown a while ago will begin next Tuesday and is supposed to be complete by the start of December. The good part of this is that it will finally get done but the bad part is that nine of us (myself included) will be moving back to where we used to be (not the exact same rooms but next door) for the duration in order to give the builders space to work.

This does not bode well for performance as it will now be significantly more difficult to communicate with the remainder of the team who are staying behind…

The office move today went through reasonably smoothly with the issues that I mentioned yesterday were solved by placing a total of two desks in their planned locations. At minimum the other desks were rotated while others were swapped between locations and most of them were also rotated.

Instead of sitting so that one of the doors to the office (they are on opposite sites) would hit the back of my chair if I rolled backwards a bit I rotated my desk by 90 degrees so my back is to the wall and the door across to the right. Unfortunately I had to swap my desk (2100mm long) with another one (1800mm) in order to allow for adequate clearance but after getting set up I did miss the extra 300mm.

Surprisingly all the network and phone points were installed in time and much more importantly they work as expected. However one thing about that that may become an issue is that the new rack for all of this was installed in the old server room with a raised floor. Just how are they going to remove the floor from under it prior to renovations?

For the past three weeks we have been spending one hour a day at work sorting through stuff in preperation for the move to new offices. Well as of tonight everything that is going is boxed and/ or stickered as at 7AM tomorrow the movers start moving…

It will be interesting to see how everything fits in the new offices considering that the facilities people have based the layout on a plan that has walls and doors in the wrong places. But if they say that two 2100mm desks will fit in a 3900mm space then I guess we have to assume they know what they are doing…

For some time now there has been a space issue at work as more staff join the team while the office space has not increased appropriately. We have taken over some other offices but it simply hasn’t been enough. A couple of months ago it was raised that there was a possibility of us moving across to some vacated space in a building just off campus (but owned by Monash) but it had already been promised to another group. Our offices are in the basement (really a semi basement with big windows in most of the offices) of one of the administration buildings and yesterday we received word that someone upstairs urgently needed space for some finance group and our current space would be suitable.

This morning this was confirmed and in around three weeks we will be moving and then again around four months later. This double move is because the new group urgently needs our space so we will move into the front half of the new space and then move into the rear half once it has been refurbished. Then once the front half has been refurbished another group that is also in the basement of the administration building will move across.

While moving will give us a lot more space there is the downside of no longer being a short walk from all the food outlets, banks and the post office that are located in the Campus Centre. Apart from one cafe around the corner anything like that will now require a, albeit short, drive. This does has the advantage of making it more difficult to waste money…

Apart from actual work this was pretty much all that was talked about and the biggest topic was in regard to transport and how it will affect people in different ways: Read the rest of this entry…