Roadmap for Small GIS Projects Introduction This whitepaper provides a roadmap for implementing small GIS projects that support conservation organizations and other NGOs engaged in citizen science projects. Typical implementations of such GIS projects include the increasingly common web mapping applications many conservation organization use to provide data discovery services and mapping tools to geographically visualize a wide variety of environmental data. By their very nature, these applications support diverse user communities and may need to be stood up or adapted rapidly based on changing needs. The practical guidelines and examples in this project implementation road map are intended to help managers of small GIS projects strike the right balance between management and technical tasks, so a project team can deliver effective and timely solutions with a planned level of effort of 250 hours or less. To illustrate how GIS project implementation principles can be successfully applied to these types of projects, The Trust for Public Land’s (TPLs) Conservation Almanac – a recently released web mapping application, will be used as an example. How to use this GIS Project Roadmap As a practical guide for project managers of small GIS implementation, this GIS Implementation Roadmap has two parts: Project Management and GIS Implementation Concepts. This section reviews basic project management concepts and the primary stages of the project management and system development lifecycles. Managers should read this section to refresh their understanding of some fundamental project implementation principles and to understand the basic theoretical concepts behind the guidelines in the project walkthrough that comprises the remainder of this whitepaper. Walking Through the Implementation of a Small GIS Project: A Web Mapping Example from the Trust for Public Land. This section steps through each of the primary project stages – from initiation through deployment with practical guidelines and examples. Managers should use this section for step-by-step instructions on how to complete essential project activities for a small GIS or web mapping project. Project Management and GIS Implementation Concepts
Include critical dependencies in your schedule, especially external ones. (E.g. the release schedule of your Internet Service Provider (ISP) if you are using a third party for hosting) Allocate time in your schedule for reviews, testing, and bug fixing Validate all estimates for development work with the technical lead. How much Time should be spent on Planning? For a small project, the typical level of effort to complete this stage is less than 5% of the planned project budget. For the TPL Conservation Almanac Web Mapping tools, initiation and planning combined consumed approximately 10 hours. Example—TPL Conservation Almanac Work Plan and Schedule Figure 8 shows the milestone schedule as it applied to the TPL Conservation Almanac Web Mapping application and excerpts from the detailed work plan. The example relates the major milestone schedule and tasks to the detailed scheduled activities for that task. Figure 9 shows the list of deliverables for each major task in the schedule. This deliverables list is a major element to track project status during Execution and Control. The complete schedule and work plan and schedule are included in the additional resources section of this white paper. Applicable excerpts from the detailed schedule will be revisited to provide context for each of the examples that are provided in the discussion of upcoming project implementation steps. For example, as shown below, the planning activities for the TPL Conservation Almanac Web Mapping Tools project, involves a start up meeting and the finalization the project work plan and schedule: Initiation and Planning Activities for the TPL Conservation Almanac Web Mapping Tools