The worldwide children's charity Plan International had its international HQ (IHQ) at Woking in Surrey and we were called in by Clive Moore, their HR Director, who explained that the lease on the Woking offices would run out in 18 months.

As a result he needed an independent strategic review carried out to identify other commercially viable HQ locations elsewhere in the world from which Plan could better serve their 'customers' i.e., disadvantaged children in third world countries.

In close collaboration with his Rhode Island USA based Executive Committee members (EXCO), Clive had already drawn up a list of critical issues and criteria which the strategic review would need to cover. These were:

1. Should we renew the lease on our Woking building?
2. Where can we best achieve efficiencies through cost reductions?
3. Where can we best interact with other NGO's (UNICEF, UNESCO etc)?
4. Where can we best improve the diversity of our IHQ staff and thus illustrate our greater cultural diversity out to our global reach and status?
5. We must avoid any potential loss of our existing institutional memory
6. We need closer relationships with our field operations

A number of initial 'qualifying' locations which offered good infrastructure and ICT, low political risk and English language orientation had been discussed and agreed with EXCO – these locations being Amsterdam/The Hague, Bangkok, Bonn, Brussels, Casablanca, Copenhagen, Johannesburg, Panama, Madrid, Manchester, Paris, Vienna and Woking itself.

• At this point we were asked to take over and carry out the further, and much more detailed, research required. To do this we decided to use a series of evaluation filters to screen location options in or out by reference to their ability to match a series of key criteria (please refer to our 'Short Listing Process' article).
• We therefore examined the EXCO list of locations by reference to their time zone 'window' compatibility with GMT (based on plus/minus 2 hours) and the availability of scheduled flights to key Plan regional and field locations including Senegal, Bangkok, Johannesburg and Panama. This left Amsterdam, The Hague, Bonn, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris and Woking as the short listed candidates to examine in greater detail.
• We next developed two parallel streams of research – one being based on qualitative issues (better than/worse than?) the other on quantitative issues (how much?) with the two streams finally merging, carrying with them the necessary information and data to inform and illustrate our final conclusions.
• Working closely with their Finance Director we researched and calculated the overall annual cost base at Plan's Woking offices and used this as the benchmark to compare with 'like for like' offices in the short listed locations. These data showed that The Hague would be the least costly (saving £0.73m per annum) with Bonn being the most expensive (+ £1.08m compared to Woking) (please refer to our 'Quantitative Savings and Qualitative Scores' article).
• The Plan team had prioritised the key qualitative issues as being those of available human resources, infrastructure and communications, the general business environment, attractive areas for staff to live and labour flexibility . Our research into these five key areas resulted in Copenhagen coming out on top followed by Amsterdam/The Hague, Woking, Madrid and (rather surprisingly) Paris in last place.
• The other big issue was that of the one-off costs of relocation should the final decision be to make a lock, stock and barrel move out of the Woking Plan IHQ to one of the alternative locations on the short list.
• In the absence of a real scenario we therefore talked to Clive Moore and his colleagues to get their views on how many existing staff would be likely to move and how many would opt for redundancy. We suggested they should look at the outcomes on the basis of a worst case, mid-range and best case scenario.
• Their mid range assumptions indicated that some 30 staff would be prepared to relocate, with 76 opting for redundancy. Using the estimated cumulative overall costs the gross one-off 'exit' costs in the event of a move overseas was estimated as £3.98m.

Overall Conclusion:
After all our research had been completed, checked and verified our conclusions were that a commercial case for relocating to any of the short listed cities we examined could not be made.

Although relocating to The Hague would save Plan some £0.73m per annum the one-off costs of £3.98m for the relocation itself, with this equating to a six year pay back period.