With a population of over 1M citizens incorporating 11 former municipalities, the City of Ottawa is Canada’s capital city, its fourth largest municipality, and the home of the federal legislature. Pivotal to the growth and prosperity of this burgeoning community, the City of Ottawa’s Building Code Services (BCS) Department administers over 100 distinct permits, license, and planning applications. To meet the City’s substantial construction demands, with 600 infrastructure projects valued at approximately $700 million in an average year, Ottawa’s civic leaders and city builders required a truly robust solution for processing land development and permitting applications—efficiently and cost-effectively.
With this goal in mind, in 2020 the City of Ottawa decided to replace components of its 20 plus-year-old Municipal Application Partnership (MAP) software solution. Considered an “end-of-life” system requiring extensive modernization, the MAP application supported 1,500 clients across various City departments with an average of 500-to-700 concurrent users. Including integrations with Esri Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the scope of the MAP application included the following modules:
Following an extensive 3-year due diligence process that included a system ‘sandbox’, product demonstrations, user training, and functional/technical support, the City of Ottawa selected the POSSE LMS solution (now known as POSSE PLS, Permitting and Licensing Software) from Computronix. A COTS solution providing proven “off-the-shelf” business processes with award-winning workflow automation, this ‘Powered by POSSE’ solution would equip BCS to realize its twofold innovation mandate to, 1) Modernize existing business processes to better serve residents and business needs, while simultaneously, 2) Meeting Ottawa’s evolving technology needs.
“The City of Ottawa looks forward to implementing the POSSE LMS System to facilitate convenient, accessible land management services for our burgeoning building community. Following our exhaustive evaluation of the available solutions in the marketplace, we are confident that our selection of POSSE LMS will result in a transformative land management system delivering easy-to-use planning, permitting, licensing and inspection services; yielding faster turnaround times and superior service outcomes for residents and public servants alike.”
John Buck
Chief Building Official
City of Ottawa
The City of Ottawa’s Building Code Services team oversees the approval of construction related applications, including permit, and inspection and code enforcement activities, to ensure applicants meet all legislated and non-legislated requirements. Having chosen POSSE LMS, a proven solution for achieving best practices administration of these core business processes, BCS established a readily achievable project vision focused on 3 core goals:
Project Vision
With the legacy MAP system providing no web-based customer service interfaces, the City of Ottawa was keenly focused on delivering an exceptional new online user experience for their development community, with requirements for the envisioned permitting portal articulating several key wins:
The City of Ottawa’s new Building, Planning, and Land Development software system went live on September 2024.
Providing citizens with digital access to online permits and applications for Building Code Services, this POSSE LMS solution was an immediate success with Ottawa’s development community with the BCS team receiving praise across the entirety of their stakeholder spectrum—from architects, builders, and developers to internal city planners, policymakers, and administrative staff.
In addition to the software system meeting and/or exceeding all the core project requirements, the project delivery process was notable as well, achieving exceptional efficiencies, standards, and innovations, on several fronts:
Two ‘Go Lives’
Initially envisioned as a single ‘big bang’ go live, the product implementation experts at Computronix advocated instead for a phased approach incorporating two separate ‘go-live’ implementations to help the project first gather and then maintain internal momentum.
The first go-live delivered a subset of the larger project scope including 7 initial interfaces, two lower volume business processes, and the initial launch of BCS’s internal staff portal. Serving as a low-risk framework for the rest of the project, this initial go-live configuration equipped internal staff to get hands-on and fluent with various system interfaces and workflows much quicker than they would in a more conventional project plan.
In addition to facilitating increased system adoption and a longer training window, putting a reduced scope system into production much earlier in the process enabled client and vendor alike more lead-time to analyze and address tailored configurations specific to BCS’s exacting business requirements. As a result of this prudent approach to project delivery, the second go-live delivering an additional 28 business processes far exceeded customer expectations with only minor issues reported AND staff well equipped to hit the ground running with the new system thanks to their previous hands-on utilization.
24/7 Self-Service Permitting Portal
With the launch of their Powered by POSSE system, Ottawa’s Building Code Services team proudly debuted their new Citizen Services Portal, giving citizens the ability to submit an application on any mobile device, from the comfort of their home or work site. A fully paperless process equipping applicants to enter information, uploads plans, and submit payment, without traveling to a Client Service Center, applicants could also check project status(es) in real-time by accessing the portal to view updates and comments from BCS staff.
Emblematic of the project’s mission to deliver an exceptional user experience for the City of Ottawa’s development community, BCS and Computronix worked together closely to deliver innovative automation-assisted workflows to support the City’s complex business rules for multi-stakeholder permissions and dynamic development charge disbursements.
Dynamic ePlans Collaboration
Seamlessly integrated with their systems’ permitting and inspection workflows, BCS’s new ePlans module makes collaborative permitting submission, review and approval a reality for Ottawa builders and developers. Progressing the municipality from paper-driven processes to automation-assisted digital workflows, this new ePlans paradigm brings immediate system advantages and efficiencies to both external AND internal stakeholders, including the following:
Achieving the 2,300+ business requirements detailed in the initial RFP, the City of Ottawa’s ‘Powered by POSSE’ Building, Planning, and Land Development System is a testament to the extensive capabilities of the POSSE platform to configure business rules and system workflows to the exacting needs of a full-services agency operating in a highly complex regulatory environment.
Following its successful launch in September 2024, the system received widespread approval amongst BCS staff for its ease-of-use and the immediate efficiency gains realized in the areas of service management and customer satisfaction.
With the system reducing a 15-step intake process to a single step, the system achieved rapid adoption amongst Ottawa’s development community, with a 40% decrease in service desk volumes within the first two weeks contributing to a corresponding increase in digital applications.
In fact, an internal staff survey quantifying user satisfaction with the new system resulted in average ranking of 8-out-of-10, an outstanding ranking according to John Buck, the City of Ottawa’s Chief Building Official. A similar survey is envisioned for the system’s external users with BCS encouraged by the fact that not a single complaint has been received by the City’s external users to date.
With the Phase One implementation and integration of POSSE LMS within the City of Ottawa’s existing IT application architecture now complete, including a comprehensive suite of configured workflows and interfaces for Building Code Services, the focus now shifts to Phase 2 deliverables supporting application workflows and business rules logic for the following:
Building on the already extensive work completed to migrate data from the legacy MAP system and integrate POSSE LMS with a host of the City’s applications portfolio (including Esri, AMP, SAP, Lagan Citizen Centric Client Service Management (CSM), Enterprise Directory Services (EDS), and Paymentus, the stage is now set for more transformative innovation for the benefit of the City of Ottawa’s staff, stakeholders, and citizens
Is your agency making do with underperforming software?
Contact us today to see if POSSE is the right fit for your needs.
