A new management approach improves GIS service delivery in Kamloops

If you manage the geographic information systems (GIS) function within a larger organization, you might have asked yourself, how do we streamline our GIS workflows so we can tackle anything that comes at us? How do we improve service delivery to other departments within the organization to improve everyone’s quality of life—not just our own? The City of Kamloops, BC has answered these questions by integrating its GIS function into its IT division’s service request and documentation systems and modernizing their operations. Led by Kamloops’ Geographic Information Services manager Adam Chadwick, this digital transformation has made the day-to-day work of GIS less stressful and more enjoyable for the City’s small team.

The City of Kamloops, British Columbia is a city of 103,000 people in southern British Columbia, located at the confluence of the North and South Thompson Rivers. Because the City is small but growing rapidly, Kamloops’ departments—including its geographic information systems (GIS) team—have had to innovate and get organized quickly in order to meet increasing demand.

I spoke to Kamloops GIS manager Adam Chadwick, who has been with the City since 1993, about what his team has been doing to innovate with GIS. Not only has GIS at the City become a core corporate resource, but the GIS workflows they’ve established are making work more enjoyable for Adam and his team.

A need to simplify GIS task triage and work assignment processes

With limited resources, the GIS team faced increased individual workloads, sometimes leading to delays in completing tasks for the City departments they support.

“What really started this off was: when I’m not here, I can’t assign or track the work,” says Adam. “Our services need to continue to run without any one of us being here.”

Traditional communication methods like phone calls and in-person chats were found to be a locus of miscommunication and unnecessary effort. This was made especially clear during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the change to remote work highlighted the team’s lack of process documentation and the limitations of their existing task management processes. Knowledge gaps were exposed, as was the team’s dependence on individual staff members for institutional knowledge. The team needed to be aware of all requests and their individual status, but they didn’t have this kind of visibility. This sometimes led to confusion and duplicated effort.

Adam needed a way to streamline the GIS team’s task management process within the IT division, all without being reliant on any one individual’s undocumented knowledge.

Changing the game with a “digital by default” approach

To address these challenges, the GIS team’s service request processes were rolled into the IT division’s Helpdesk and Project Request Services model. Having a common system for requesting IT services would help integrate the GIS team with the larger IT team, as well as provide a single point of contact for requesting IT services. All requests would begin as digital submissions, allowing the GIS team to easily receive, track, manage and reassign requests.

This integration of GIS services with IT services allowed Adam to position GIS as a corporate resource rather than a standalone service.

“Falling through the cracks” a thing of the past: an IT-powered approach to GIS service delivery

In line with this “buy not build” principle, the City of Kamloops’ IT division uses Atlassian JIRA to manage their IT helpdesk, as well as their project and GIS requests. City staff submit requests through a user-friendly web-based IT portal that acts as a single, citywide funnel into JIRA. This is supported by Atlassian Confluence for self-help documentation. GIS-related requests are then assigned to the GIS team, who review, prioritize, assign, reassign, monitor, update and manage their own requests using a web-based kanban board. Members of the GIS team then review the requests on the kanban board as needed throughout the workday, and together as a team during more formal twice-weekly review meetings.

Every week, on a rotating basis, one person on the City’s GIS team is assigned to be the team’s monitor. This person keeps track of tasks, checks task assignments, descriptions and ensures everything is captured digitally.

Additional aspects of this system include:

Reducing low-value, repetitive work through self-serve options: By providing self-serve solutions and thorough documentation of all processes, the GIS team is helping City staff find answers, oftentimes without needing to submit requests. Also, by creating reusable apps, maps, analyses and datasets, the GIS team is saving City staff—as well as their own—time and easing everyone’s workload.

Improved communication between the GIS team and City staff: The GIS team’s kanban board (including task and project details and status) is visible to everyone on the team and in the IT division. Tasks are also transferrable from team member to team member. For example, if a GIS team member goes on vacation, they can pass their open tasks to another team member, who will be able to get up to speed quickly thanks to the detailed task cards on the kanban board. Tagging is also enabled so new people can be easily looped into a conversation.

The GIS team also uses a dashboard, built in house, to track current and future projects and administrative tasks, up/down status of ArcGIS Enterprise servers and map services, ArcGIS Online organization health, automated script execution status and more.

Using these systems, no one needs to rely on their own memory or task tracking system to keep on top of work.

Automation of repetitive GIS tasks to increase data accuracy and free up staff time: For example, a data checking script runs every night on the City’s production geodatabase, checking for a wide variety of data errors. Errors are automatically emailed to the appropriate GIS team member and received the following morning. Data errors are thus quickly corrected, and GIS team members can focus their efforts on higher value work.

Complete service continuity: Although verbal, email or Microsoft Teams discussions with City staff are sometimes required, those same City staff are then required to add the details of those discussions to their electronic requests so that the information is captured digitally. This reduces miscommunication and ensures all request details are tied to the relevant request, making them immediately available for review.

By adopting a digital-by-default mindset and prioritizing efficient request intake and management, the GIS team is able to quickly take on new tasks and assign them to any GIS team member. All requests and customer interactions are recorded in the request handling system, allowing any team member to step in for any other. Because task status is visible to everyone, no task falls through the cracks, even if a team member is away.

“At the City of Kamloops, GIS has become a strategic corporate resource much like HR or accounting. It’s a foundational tool. Our GIS operations management approach reflects that by embedding our work directly into the IT function.” —Adam Chadwick, GIS manager, City of Kamloops

Kamloops’ GIS operations management approach—itself a combination of approaches to technology, process and procedure—enables efficient request intake and management that lets GIS team members reorient themselves toward more strategic, high-value tasks.

What's it like?

When asked what life has been like since implementing this new approach, Adam says: “It’s less stressful. It’s enjoyable. Enabling team members with appropriate tools, procedures and processes frees me up from having to closely monitor tasks so I can do more strategic work and investigate new opportunities. That’s really quite rewarding, and I’d want other GIS departments to be able to benefit in a similar way.”

Using the new system has transformed the GIS team’s daily work environment. Adam notes that the system empowers his staff to manage their tasks independently, reducing the need for constant oversight and giving staff members more time to engage in new, impactful GIS technology- and geospatial data-based projects. And because of their “digital by default”, “self-serve” and “buy not build” approaches, the GIS team can work more on strategic solution delivery than manual request tracking, troubleshooting and application maintenance.

“We’re better able to focus on initiatives that move the needle, rather than most of our time being consumed by day-to-day, operational tasks,” says Adam. And through a retirement, the GIS Section reduced its staff by 25%, yet are now handling many more requests for service than they were able to in the past. “That’s a quantifiable result that’s not insignificant,” says Adam, “and I attribute it to not just one or two of these aspects of GIS operations management, but to the many improvements and efficiencies gained by employing these approaches and strategies, which are informed by the ITIL framework for service delivery.”

This digital transformation process has not only improved operational efficiency, but has also fostered a culture of continuous improvement, knowledge transfer and service continuity. Kamloops’ GIS team is able to continually adjust and improve how they do things, adopting new approaches and changing or dropping what doesn’t work.

“After all,” says Adam, “GIS is a journey, not just a destination.”

On the cusp of digital transformation? Need help figuring out the first steps to achieving what the City of Kamloops did? Reach out to Esri Canada’s Strategic Advisory group to get on the right path.