November 6, 2026

Most GIS teams do not have a capacity problem. They have a servicedelivery problem – and this is fixable without hiring anyone.

If you manage GIS for a city, county, regional district,utility or health authority, you have had this conversation.

Someone from Public Works catches you in the hall. “Quickone — can you pull the sanitary sewer for the Maple Street job?” You say yes.You always say yes. Then it becomes an email, then a Teams message at 4:40 on aFriday asking whether it ever happened.

Meanwhile your team of four field requests through fivedifferent channels, and the only complete record of any of it lives insomebody’s head, somebody’s inbox, or a sticky note on a monitor.

Here is the uncomfortable part: this is usually not astaffing problem. Most GIS teams that feel underwater are uncoordinated ratherthan understaffed. Work arrives without structure, gets triaged by whoever isat their desk, and finishes without leaving a trace. When someone leaves theorganization twenty years of knowledge leaves with them. And when you cannotsee the work, you cannot defend the team — your evidence for another positionis a general feeling that everyone is very busy.

It is fixable, and the proof is not theoretical. Onemid-sized BC city made this shift, then lost a position to retirement — a 25percent reduction in the team — while handling more requests than before. Alldone without having to rehire. Call it GIS service management.

The real goal is buying back your week

Every GIS manager knows the shape of the problem even ifthey have never named it. The week splits into two kinds of work, and the splitis badly wrong.

Tactical work is the request queue, the data fixes, the ninth copy of the same map, the app nobody else will maintain, the phone call that could have been a web page. Necessary, invisible, endless. Strategic work is the new capability, the analysis that changes a decision, the automation that removes a task permanently — the work that gets GIS invited into rooms it otherwise would not be in.

Where the week goes

• Taking and chasing requests
• The same map, produced again
• Data maintenance and fixes
• Maintaining apps and scripts
• Answering the same questions

Where the week should go

• Capabilities you did not have
• Analysis that changes a decision
• Automation that removes work
• Self-serve tools for other staff
• Training and data governance

Tactical work fills the week because it comes with deadlines and people waiting for answers. Strategic work gets whatever time remains.Every practice highlighted below has the same objective: shrink the first column to make room for the second—not to work less, but to spend the week on work that makes a difference.

But importantly, before you fix it, measure it. Have the team log one week against three categories: GIS requests, GIS administration and maintenance, new GIS capabilities. Most managers are surprised by the answer, and the number turns a hunch into a business case.

Start with digital by default

The highest-leverage change is also the simplest: every GIS request enters through one digital submission channel, in one system, the sameway for every submitter. Not most requests, every request. One front door, oneform, one queue.

That last part is where teams quietly fail. The technology is easy; the discipline is hard. Someone senior has your cell number and prefers to use it, and it costs nothing to say yes in the moment. Except it does: it costs you the record, and it teaches everyone that the front door isoptional.

A single intake makes the work visible, because everything sits in the same place in the same shape; transferable, because a request becomes an object rather than a memory; and defensible, with a timestamped record of what was asked, when, by whom and what happened next.

Triage then becomes an activity rather than an interruption.The team works from a queue — a kanban board, or whatever your IT divisional ready owns — with a short standing review once or twice a week to setpriority, size and assignment. One person on rotation acts as the week’s monitor, checking that requests were captured, descriptions complete, priorities set, and requests assigned, nothing sitting in limbo. Rotating that role spreads the judgement and stops the system depending on whoever cares mostab out it. The process becomes sustainable and resilient – it doesn’t depend on any single person being there to ensure it continues to operate.

A request should also carry its own context. A title and a due date are not a record, it is a reminder. The artefacts that explain the work belongs with it — the screenshot, the sketch photographed at the counter,the answer, the note about why an option was rejected. When a conversation happens by phone or in the hall, the person who had it writes the outcome and attaches it to the request. Then anyone can pick-up the request cold.

Build out the rest of the operating model

GIS request intake and triage are the spine. Six practices sit around them, and they reinforce each other, which is why the combination beats any one of them alone.

Automation. Automate the work that is repetitive, rule-based and fails quietly: nightly data checks, layer refreshes,data transfers, service health checks. A script that validates the production GIS database overnight turns a problem discovered by a resident into one discovered before anyone even reaches the office.

Cross-training. If only one person can publish a service, run the address update or produce the council map, you do not have a specialist — you have a single point of failure with a vacation schedule. Cross-training removes the queue that forms whenever that person is away or overloaded.

Process development and documentation.A process that lives in one person’s head is a single point of failure with a pension plan. Document it while you do it, not after, because after never comes. And don’t let it get stale: a process document is a living thing, not a museum piece. Review and update it on a regular schedule, so whenever the software, data, or people change, it reflects how the work is done. Process and activity documentation is not optional; it is the difference between a highly functioning team and a group of people who share a printer.

Knowledge Base, How-To articles. Nobody has ever been excited to write How-To articles, but nothing else on this list pays back faster. Every time your team answers the same question — how do I geta property report, why can't I see the watermain — that answer becomes a short article people can find. The next person gets a How-To article link instead of a hand-holding session. It also forces consistency: 4 staff answering from memory give 4 different answers, one article always gives the same one.Internal knowledge base articles ensure that a repetitive task only must be figured out once, saving time the next time and ensuring it’s done the same way each time.

Training and enablement. Articles answer a question someone already has. Training stops a category of questions forming. Short sessions, online materials, a departmental champion or two, some coaching at onboarding — every hour comes back as many hours you are not spending as human middleware between a person and a map, app or dashboard.

Self-serve. Take the genuinely simple, repeatable requests and let people serve themselves: a public map, a download page, a configured app, a form that produces the thing with nobody in the middle. Not everything can be self-serve — but if the team spends a third of its week producing the same five outputs, that is not a service, it is aqueue you were talked into.

Buy, not build. Every hour spent writing custom code is an hour not spent on analysis, plus a maintenance obligation you just signed on to. Where a configurable product does the job,buy it, configure it, and keep your developers for what is genuinely yours.Buy-not-build is a rule of thumb, not a religion: the handful of things that are your differentiator deserve custom work. The other eighty percent do not.

None of this is invented here. It is IT service management,borrowed: service request management, knowledge-centred service. IT made this transition twenty years ago and left the playbook lying around. The cultural part is the one worth stealing — organizations that do this well stopped treating service work as the thing that gets in the way of the real work. Service work is the work.

What you actually get

Capacity you did not have to hire for. The 25 percent came from losing a position, not adding one, while capacity went up.

Continuity.Work does not stop when one person is away, and knowledge lives in the system not someone’s head, notebook or inbox.

Fewer interruptions, because self-serve options, published articles and trained users absorb a share of what used to be a request.

A defensible record. Freedom-of-information requests, council questions, disputes about what was asked and when — answerable in minutes, not an afternoon.

A better case for resources. With volume, turnaround and backlog visible, the budget conversation becomes about numbers rather than how busy everyone feels.

A team that stays. Staff who spend the week chasing untracked requests do not feel like professionals. The manager who led this change in that BC city put it in four words: less stressful, more enjoyable.

The honest part

None of this is free. The tooling is the cheap part; what you are buying is behaviour change, and that is the hardest thing a manager does. The first months feel slower, because you are doing the work and documenting it at the same time. Some people will route around the front door,including people senior to you, and holding that line needs explicit backing from whoever you report to. If your director will not say “all GIS requests go through the portal” out loud, in a meeting, more than once, it will not stick.

Where to start

Do not do all of it at once. Pick the front door and giveyourself and your users time to adapt.

1.   Choose the system — preferably one your IT division already owns and supports.

2.   Build one input form with five required fields, not fifteen.

3.   Publish a single submission address and tell every department it is the only one.

4.   Standup a request queue, and book twice-weekly reviews in the calendar permanently.

5.   Write knowledgebase and How-To articles from your most common requests, and pair people up onthe tasks only one can do today.

Then measure one number for a year: requests received. Ittells you whether the front door is working, and eventually it buys you acapacity conversation that is not a complaint.

The idea is not complicated. GIS stopped being a specialist service a while ago. It is a corporate resource the same way HR and finance are, and corporate resources are run as services: digital by default, visible by default, documented by default. The teams that make that shift do not work harder. They just stop relying on memory, goodwill and whoever answers their phone.

Perry Group Consulting works with municipalities on GIS strategy, service delivery and IT modernization. If your GIS team is running on memory, we would be glad to talk.

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