Restructure account segment of COA

Business has a requirement to fully restructure the account segment of the current defined COA. Is there anyone out there that have ever attempted this and been successful? What would be the correct process to attempt this? What all needs to be looked at and done?

Example: currently the value for accounts that fall under let's say assets are out of range. A number of them would maybe be 61100 up to 61105 and then number 61106 to 62000 was assigned to liability accounts.

The idea is to come up with a brand new design for only the account value and then to start using the new numbers....  however there are a number of things that come to mind: balances? historical data, reporting, cross validation, security rules, etc