Six Months of Survey Work Resolved in a Couple of Meetings Through Pragmatic Problem-Solving
Background
A county council’s Green Infrastructure Team Leader needed to compile a comprehensive record of who owned and who maintained every patch of grassland across the county. The data had to come from more than 260 parishes across the county, each responsible for a different collection of land parcels. Without this information, the council could not properly account for its green infrastructure obligations or plan maintenance responsibilities going forward.
The Challenge
On first assessment, the task looked like a six-month undertaking. The assumption was that someone would need to sit with each parish in turn, work through their land parcels manually, and record ownership and maintenance details one by one. At half a day per parish across more than 260 parishes, the maths was unforgiving: over six months of work for one person, just to gather the data. It was a significant resource commitment for what was essentially a data-gathering exercise.
The Approach
Brought in to support the project, the first step was to question whether the problem had been framed correctly. The instinct to go out and collect information manually from each parish was understandable, but it was the slow direction. The faster direction was to turn it around entirely: give each parish everything they needed to respond efficiently, rather than extracting information from them in person.
The solution came together in a couple of facilitated meetings. The council’s GIS Officer was brought into the room, and working through the problem together, the approach took shape and was largely executed on the fly:
- An interactive map of the entire county was created, with every grassland parcel identified and assigned a unique reference ID.
- Each parish was provided with a simple, clear guide explaining what was needed and how to respond.
- Each parish received a pre-prepared export of all the land parcels within their boundary, already mapped and labelled, ready for them to mark up with ownership and maintenance responsibility.
The GIS Officer had the technical capability to do this all along. The contribution was in facilitating the right conversation, framing the problem differently, and creating the conditions for that capability to be applied in the right direction.
Result
What had been projected as six months of manual fieldwork was resolved through a couple of short meetings. The parishes had everything they needed to respond without lengthy visits; the council had a clean, referenced dataset it could actually use. The GIS Officer’s capability, which already existed within the organisation, had simply never been pointed at the problem in this way.
The case illustrates a consistent principle in how Gibbs Brothers approaches complex-looking problems: the answer is rarely more effort in the same direction. Stepping back, involving the right people, and redesigning the process can achieve in hours what the original approach would have taken months to complete.
This engagement was delivered by Roscoe Gibbs working in a facilitation capacity with the council’s Green Infrastructure and GIS teams.