Smartsheet: Does It Align with USSF’s Innovation Forward Needs?
It’s been 30 days since I started hearing the rumblings of a tool called Smartsheet. Usually, when you hear about a new tool, it’s a precise tool for a precise job. Now it’s not to say that smartsheet isn’t precise, but the groups and jobs it was being thought of were incredibly diverse.
Innovation folks at The Forge (SLD45) were considering it as an effective means to gamify tasks and throw value toward connections and processes that encouraged growth. The Honor Guard was thinking it could be a nice tool to track work and communicate when not on AFNET. The folks at Cape Canaveral’s MOC were considering using it as a tool to save time reporting large amounts of data and the SIO staff at DET1 were considering using it to manage ground transport operations.
It was this that had me dive in headfirst and learn as much about the tool as possible.
As the days passed, I absorbed a bounty of knowledge and started to see the great potential in the vision of our Space Force clients. This tool was actually looking like it could do the job. But, the too good to be true thoughts started to invade as I looked to expose the pit falls.
The first, quite common one in the DoD is “ is this adoptable”? Oftentimes a great tool comes around that’s just a bit too dissimilar than the current process and tools and quickly those tools fall by the wayside despite being perfect for the job. This was not the case for smartsheet. The DoD love the Microsoft suite and with smartsheet being excel but on steroids and having integrations with their commonly used Microsoft tools, people were easily able to see themself using the tool with very little training.
Second was, “is it secure”? At this level of work, folks oftentimes are storing PII, Socials, PHI, and things far more sensitive. I had to hope that with such power, smartsheet understood the responsibility. Turns out they sure did. After a nice dialogue with Smartsheets’s
Kevin McDermott (Their DoD and Aerospace account executive), we learned that throwing it into the Platform One digital castle and restricting access to CAC access only was a breeze.
It was great to see how serious smartsheet took their tool and I was able to use this to springboard several demos with leaders across the various deltas (SLD45 and SLD30). These demos lead to ideation, and those ideas lead to prototypes which are now on the verge of being up and running tools for the folks I mentioned earlier.
Although it’s a bit early to assume anything, it seems that this is going to be a tool widely adopted in the USSF ( it’s already very popular in the Air Force ). I say this as the time saved in reporting seems to encourage most of the adoption on its own. In addition the way it fits more nuanced needs with its automations and flexibility in form data being pulled in from non licensed users outside of the USSF ( those with no CAC ) makes it a tool that solves a lot of problems that have existed for decades in an simple and secure manner.
I hope that this short story resonates with some of you and inspires you to jump into not only smartsheet, but perhaps dive into that tool that is a buzz in your workplace. You never know the value of a tool until you start to poke around and get to learn it!
Lastly, if you feel that you are not the type of person that has time to poke around like this and work in the aerospace and defense space, feel free to shoot me a message and maybe myself and the great team we have at Silicon Mountain might be able to make an impactful discovery with your team.
Here is a video on some basic things that got me into Smartsheet:
https://youtu.be/GK7ZekVZ5RE
