The Adoption of QGIS at Plymouth Community Homes

1
The Adoption of QGIS at Plymouth Community Homes

• John Yates Senior IT Business Analyst / Project
  Manager
• Brian London IT Application Support Analyst

2
Who are we?

• We are a Social Housing provider in Plymouth with
  approximately 19,500 properties (Private
  tenancies and Leasehold)
• PCH formed following property transfer from
  Plymouth City Council in 2010

3
A bit of background . . .

• I started at PCH in May 2014
• One of my initial tasks was to undertake a
  drains-up of PCHs GIS use
• Initial findings indicated somewhat rudimentary
  use of an application called GGP
• 10 x user licences
• No real application ownership
• Lack of training / investment etc

4
How did PCH become aware of QGIS?

• GGP Account Mgr referred me to the IT Department
  at PCC to understand their use of GGP
• Established that PCC were becoming less reliant
  on GGP and had since started using an open source
  GIS application . . . . QGIS!
• Free
• Provided more powerful data / spatial analysis
  tools than GGP

5
What happened next?

• With the help of PCHs Asset Manager, we
  developed a vision of how GIS could be used
  across PCH
• Brian was tasked with getting under the bonnet of
  QGIS and understanding what made it tick
• The results were ground-breaking (for PCH!)
• The next few slides illustrate how PCH have
  leveraged the power and capability of QGIS . . .

6
Asset HMS Data
Creation of spatial SQL tables by adding Eastings
and Northings

• Used QT Designer to create user friendly
  tabulated forms to display data
• Made data Read-Only to ensure that core systems
  were used to update information
• Added Title Deed data from Land Registry
• Uploaded tree data from PCHs cloud-based tree
  management system
• Estates teams using QGIS to ID areas of shared /
  sole responsibility to help avoid disputes!

7
2014 vs 2016

• As of September 2016 . . .
• Approximately 75 users of QGIS (vs 10 occasional
  users of GGP)
• User base has tripled since Jan 2016
• Dedicated GIS User Group intranet site
• Greater use by Estates teams who are creating
  their own layers
• Use Open map data to avoid issues with OS
  MasterMap licencing
• Use of Open Data provided by PCC
• The Future . . .
• Designated GIS officers to undertake GIS data
  admin tasks
• Web based maps to allow users to
• access map data from hand-held devices
• tenants to access information via self-service
  portal and this includes data such as amenities,
  libraries etc.

8
Thank you!

• Any questions . . . ?