Tips to help small GIS teams get buy-in

Are you part of a small GIS team trying to establish a foundation for growth? It can be challenging to demonstrate your value and build awareness with limited resources at your disposal. But not to worry: there are also some impactful actions you can take that will help you along the road. In this article, I offer some tips for small GIS teams.

In Esri Canada’s Management Consulting practice, we work with geographic information system (GIS) teams of many different sizes in both the public and private sectors. While all these teams face a variety of challenges, this article is intended for small GIS teams, which I roughly define as teams with two to five staff. Small GIS teams often do not have a dedicated supervisor and operate as a subset of a larger department such as engineering, information technology, planning or field services.

When we work with small GIS teams, they are rarely short of ideas to deliver meaningful value to their organizations, but are limited by lack of time, budget, visibility and strategic direction. If you are part of a small GIS team, I would like to offer you some tips to help you make the most of your limited resources and boost your value.

Let me begin with a few assumptions. I assume your organization has made some notable investments in GIS tools such as ArcGIS Pro or ArcGIS Online, and has maybe even deployed a GIS hub such as ArcGIS Enterprise. I will also assume your organization has a repository of geospatial data and that your team is responsible for managing it. The small teams we work with are often part of organizations with these capabilities but find that most of their time is taken up resolving trouble tickets, supporting users, running data processes and publishing maps or data services. Even if time was not an issue, small teams compete for funds with better-resourced and better-recognized teams. It can be dispiriting to know how much more you can offer, yet you can’t get the time or sponsorship to make anything happen.

The good news is that there are things you can do to help build awareness and enthusiasm for your program without a lot of time or budget. You can find ways to prove the value of GIS and get influential leaders on board even given limited resources. This may seem like circular logic: to provide value you need resources, but to get resources you need to demonstrate value! However, if you focus your efforts on what you can influence, you can maximize your value delivery and make a case for more resources.

Tip #1: Make basic tasks self-serve

One question you should ask is: what are we doing today that could be a self-serve capability? Many GIS systems, including ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise, enable users to perform basic GIS functions themselves instead of relying on GIS staff. There are valuable architectural guides available to help plan self-serve delivery, like this one. Think about the services you provide right now. Is your team creating content, publishing maps, building web applications or publishing GIS services? In many cases, these functions can be delivered by self-serve capabilities. For example:

• Instead of submitting field data to a GIS support person who then uploads it, a field technician could use a tool such as ArcGIS Field Maps to capture, edit and upload their own observations from the field.
• Users with sufficient training on a platform like ArcGIS Enterprise can create and share their own maps as opposed to relying on GIS staff to do so.

It is worthwhile reviewing the services you are delivering and comparing them with the self-serve capabilities at your disposal. Deploying self-serve capabilities can go a long way to freeing your team to help build your GIS program.

Tip #2: Engage with your user community

On a related note, you may be asking: how can I get my users more involved in our GIS program? This is another factor that you can influence by engaging with and building support within your user community.

Engaged GIS users are highly effective at spreading awareness of GIS through your organization; leaders will eventually take notice. You can start by simply holding regular meetings with key users, circulating an email newsletter or making use of forums like Microsoft Teams or Google Workspace.

I also highly recommend you form a Geospatial Community of Practice. Community of Practice members help deliver a range of benefits including building awareness among your organization’s leaders, contributing to a flow of ideas and helping troubleshoot GIS problems. Most importantly, a Geospatial Community of Practice is a forum through which you can build ongoing engagement with your user community to boost the value of your GIS program.

Tip #3: Focus on what matters most

I also recommend you focus your team on high-value activities by prioritizing aggressively. You can start by evaluating your work intake process. Certainly, all requests are important, but you can’t do everything at once.

I recommend you focus on small amounts of work at a time. There are many ways you can do this. Consider a weighted prioritization scheme that focuses on high value items with short turnaround times. A weighted shortest-job-first approach, such as this one, might be a good fit.

I also recommend you limit work in progress. Work management methods like Kanban put limits on the number of tasks your team will work on at any given time. Adopting work-in-progress limits and a prioritization scheme will help your team stay focused and improve their output. Does this mean you ignore all other requests? Not at all. I also recommend you maintain a backlog that you will reprioritize and draw from regularly when you assign work. A backlog that is visible to your users also helps you build trust because it lets them see that their requests have not been forgotten. To ensure transparency, consider following an established method of prioritizing work, such as this one. This will help those you serve understand how long it may be before their request is fulfilled.

Tip #4: Know your core capabilities

As you focus your activities, you should also define your team’s core capabilities. These are the things that your team and your team alone is best suited to perform. Non-core capabilities are good candidates to be outsourced, transferred or supported by other staff. For example, does your team manage and maintain your map or image servers? This is certainly important but may not be a core GIS capability. Can your organization’s IT department or other support staff handle this instead? Is it feasible to use cloud service providers who can maintain everything but GIS-specific tasks? Apply this scrutiny to all the non-core capabilities for which your team currently has ownership.

Every non-core capability you identify and redirect helps to free your team’s time and efforts to focus on your core capabilities. While each organization is unique, the following examples can help you get started.

Tip #5: Quantify your value

Finally, as you work to demonstrate the value your team delivers, remember that many leaders want to see quantifiable data to back up a value proposition. To help boost your own case, implement some key performance indicators (KPIs), which are specific measures defined to measure progress toward defined goals. There are numerous articles, such as this one, that describe the benefits of using KPIs when implementing a GIS program or strategy. There are also a variety of potential metrics available, so you should choose carefully and avoid “boiling the ocean” by selecting too many KPIs.

I hope these tips are helpful and that you can use them to gain buy-in for your small GIS team. It can be daunting to try to build a program with limited resources at your disposal. But if you focus on high-impact action items like the tips I offer here, I think you will be surprised by how effective you can be. Feel free to reach out if you need support in maximizing the value of your small GIS team. We’re here to help!

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