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 PCH’s 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 PCH’s 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 PCH’s 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
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 ?