Project Management

For a site we already know, a phone call and a rack list will do. For anywhere new we would rather do a full site survey, or at the very minimum have a walk through video and detailed photographs with rack elevations, because the things that wreck a schedule are almost never the technical ones. They are the lift that will not take a 47u rack standing up, the loading bay that closes at 6pm, the permit nobody applied for and the security desk that has no record of your crew. We check those first. We then build the plan around your change window, book the lifts, arrange out of hours access and write the RAMS the building manager will ask for.

From the initial enquiry we appoint a single point of contact to manage the project from start to finish, and we schedule Teams calls to update the status so nobody is guessing. That person coordinates our crews, your engineers, the OEM if one is involved, building management and the data centre's own security and access process. Where a cable trace and audit is in scope we produce the patching schedule and the rack elevations, and everything is labelled to your naming convention before a single connection is broken anywhere on the floor. Most of the work runs overnight or at weekends. That is when the change windows are, and we are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

We write our own RAMS. That means the method described is the method actually used. Insurance is set out plainly, with goods in transit through AXA at £2600 on an all risks basis for any one event per vehicle, public liability of no less than £2 million, and optional marine cargo which we can quote up to £0.5m without referral to our underwriters. If the project crosses a border our own in-house customs agent handles it, though we need a signed power of attorney from a company official first. European customs offices generally shut at 4pm and are closed all weekend, which affects a Friday night move more than people expect.