Welcome to the Government Community!

Chris Nammour

Hello!

This is a space for Smartsheet and Smartsheet Gov users that work in all levels of government to connect, share ideas, challenges, best practices and how you are using Smartsheet and Smartsheet Gov to create impact.

My name is Chris, I lead marketing for the Smartsheet Gov platform and am excited to get to know you all. My colleagues and I will use this space to share helpful resources, upcoming events, discussion questions, and more. But first and foremost, this space is yours to connect and collaborate with peers.

We’ve created a unique Government badge just for this community to showcase on your profile and use to connect with others. Introduce yourself and start engaging with your peers and the badge will be automatically added to your profile. We also created a new "Smartsheet Gov" tag so if your content is specific to that platform, be sure to use the new tag!

Need a little inspiration? Tell us:

• Where do you work and what’s your department/role?
• How long have you been using Smartsheet or Smartsheet Gov?
• How are you using Smartsheet or Smartsheet Gov today or planning to in the future?
• What else would you like to learn from your peers in government?

Mark Weeks

Wonderful to see a Community dedicated to Government. Excellent.

Here's my intro:

https://www.smartsheet.com/customers/government-of-western-australia

https://www.smartsheet.com/smartsheetoverachievers/winners

virgh

Hello, my name is Virginia. I work at the City of San Diego as an Information Systems Analyst. I created our City of San Diego Smartsheet User Group and I lead our monthly virtual meetings. I've been using Smartsheet since 2019 and I'm still learning new things every day. Smartsheet used to be only a tiny portion of my work, but now I am in a role that has a 50% focus on it. I am looking forward to seeing how everyone here is using Smartsheet for process improvement and project management.

Julie Becker

Hi Guys,

My name is Julie Becker, and I am overseeing the Smartsheets Program and its Process for a very political, controversal, government project that has gotten a bad reputation from the manipulative social media and news stations from California (ask me how i really feel haha).

Short version how i got started with this program; Boss asked me and 1 of our office Engineers to find and present in 48 hours an online program that has the ability to track large government / military security level projects. After we gathered a few and discussed, we ran with Smartsheets. From there, we had less than 24 hrs to learn/populate and execute a demo with the free trial in order to sell it to a large group of private federal investors. We bought the business plan and i volunteered to oversee its program for our current and all future projects. Due to all the great info that so many in this community offer out of their kind hearts, i have been able to educate myself about all the additional features/perks that this wonderful community can offer and now looking to finally upgrade to Enterprise.

• Name / Role: Julie Becker / Construction & Project Mgmt. (Government, Military, Federal/State/Local, etc..)
• Smartsheet History: 2020
• How were using SS: Need everything transparent and on the table to track start to finish, while holding everyone accountable without losing historical data (like you would with excel when users leave).
• Favorite Feature: Dashboards (because that is where we get to be creative and its colorful)
• Ongoing Education: There are a few groups i am part of that we share ideas, suggestions, tips/tricks and although most of us already know most of what the program can do, its very cool to see how others take a pre-made template that was for Healthcare and twist it into a Masterpiece for the Farming community. I look forward to sharing / receiving those same tricks of the trade our fellow comrades here use as it only makes us all better not to mention ROCK STARS!! 😁

Here is a link to my Profile Page that provides additional info on my background: Julie Becker — Smartsheet Community

below are a few laughs to get you all through this week!!! 🤣

staceylollar

Stacey Lollar, Human Resources Manager for the Calaveras County Water District. We have been using Smartsheet for almost three years. We are always looking for ways to use Smartsheet. Currently our HR department (me and one other person) use it for Recruiting and Training Scheduling. It has been a life changer for sure.

I would be interested in how other HR departments use it to collaborate with other departments and the public.

Sara S

My name is Sara Schelinski and I am a Project & Resource Manager for the Town of Normal, IL Innovation & Technology department. We have been using Smartsheet for about 1.5 years. We started using the project for I&T project management and have expanded our organization use-case to include Grant Management and strategic plan monitoring. I have also spearheaded a cross-department Smartsheet User Group that serves as our internal community of practice.

I am interested in learning how other governments are using Smartsheet integrations and API to connect the processes to Laserfiche and ArcGIS and any other innovative use cases.

I'd be glad to connect to chat about use cases, rollout, community building, etc.

Colemcgu

Colleen McGuire, WA State DCYF glad to be here and love all the innovative ways people are using Smartsheet.

TheNickOdeh

Nick Odeh - using Smartsheet Gov in the private sector to build out a lot of our Supply Chain and PMO production. Long-term fanatic of Smartsheet and former speaker at Engage.

joey.w.razzano

• Where do you work and what’s your department/role? I am the performance system administrator for the Oregon Department of Human Services and I host a monthly virtual user group called Smartsheet Sessions
• How long have you been using Smartsheet or Smartsheet Gov? 2016
• How are you using Smartsheet or Smartsheet Gov today or planning to in the future? We use Smartsheet for a wide variety of functions including project management, asset tracking, creating custom solutions to work with community partners and more
• What else would you like to learn from your peers in government? I'm always open to anything I can learn from others (so, pretty much everything!)

Rowena

“Good day, everyone. My name is Rowena, and I have the privilege of working with the Saskatchewan Health Authority. I’m pleased to discover that we have a dedicated government group for Smartsheet. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.” 😊

clolry

Hello

• Where do you work and what’s your department/role?
  I am the PMO lead at a federal government agency
• How long have you been using Smartsheet or Smartsheet Gov?
  Almost two years
• How are you using Smartsheet or Smartsheet Gov today or planning to in the future?
  We have been implementing a fairly complex PM toolset that is comprehensive from initiation through closeout. We have integrated with SS's Control Center to leverage some tools to help us scale.
• What else would you like to learn from your peers in government?
  Challenges and how they were overcome. Success stories.

Grayson Hart

Hello,

My name is Grayson Hart, and I am the Climate Action Plan Implementation Manager in Columbus, Ohio's sustainability office in the Department of Public Utilities. I've been in this role for seven months, and have been using Smartsheet for about five.

I created a Workspace for my office to track delivery planning, contacts, and, most recently, grants. Next is departmental event tracking.

I've refined a very basic tracking sheet for the climate action plan (CAP) that was created by my predecessor into a workspace I am in the process of getting members of the citywide sustainability committee and external partners plugged into. We're trying to track work being done across the city, most of which has been being done autonomously by our partners at their own pace without any centralized oversight. This is part of what my position was created to manage a couple of years ago. I seek to enable the practitioners and project managers in all areas to add "milestones" as children under the parent CAP "Action" and nest those under their respective Strategies, and Sections. We have Lead Agencies and Implementing Partners from the CAP to designate ownership for each Action and its targets. There are 2025, 2030, and 2050 targets, with a 45% reduction in Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2030 and 100% reduction by 2050 as the ultimate goal. I've created reports to pull each partner's work (by city department or external partner) into one place regardless of which Strategy sheet they originate from. I've also created reports for each individual Action, Strategy, and Section.

My next steps are to 1. engage the right people across all the partners with this Workspace, 2. work to pull in the data and metrics to demonstrate tangible progress toward our targets, and 3. create more attractive visualizations to demonstrate progress toward CAP goals, including eventually a public-facing resource. There about 36 different types of data to be tracked, from # of greenspaces to megawatts of residential solar generation.

One of the things I'd like to learn from this space is how to engage stakeholders and create buy-in. Smartsheet is a new resource for virtually all partners, so I have been hard at work making it sensible and useful as a shared space to understand our CAP and the progress on it.

Thanks!

Grayson

TitleVI2023

I've been using Smartsheet for two years as a backup to MS Project. This year, our organization migrated our projects to Smartsheet. I've been tasked with developing a project management system for the policy development team that can integrate with our complaint process. I want to learn the best practices for migrating systems, porting data, and presenting Smartsheet to stakeholders. Currently, I'm facing challenges with the new Resource Management Panel. The workload tracking is picking up ghost assignments and allocations from deleted sheets, resulting in skewed resource data that is currently unusable. I contacted Customer Success, but they could have been more helpful. I've opened a ticket, so we'll see what happens.

Trang Turtletraxx

Hi! I've always worked in the Healthcare field and only recently (6 months ago) decided to change fields completely working for an IT consulting firm. We are government contracted working with pretty much all the federal government sectors and military branches. I know I have a lot to learn about not only IT, but government projects and processes and look forward to unraveling what most feel is the convoluted framework called the US Government. I hope this forum will help.

I've been using Smartsheet for about 4 years as an Admin and Consultant building solutions for one of the largest healthcare plans in the country and continue in my Smartsheet consulting and product owner in my current IT consulting role.

Jamie Ide

I am Jamie and I am using Smartsheet to enhance our government contractors capability to deliver their expertise! I have been using Smartsheet for 3 years and am currently working for Atturra as a Smartsheet consultant.

Looking forward to hearing how SS has helped you in your Gov role!

Jenni

Hi all. I'm Jenni and I live and work in Melbourne, Australia.

Working in the Not For Profit sector at a Primary Health Network with a workforce of just over 100 people. We receive federal government health-allocated funds and commission local services to deliver primary health services.

I joined the organisation 15 months ago as a Project Officer and had never even heard of Smartsheet. Now I'm one of the leading users and provide support and training for others!

Whilst we are technically not government, we are bound by government data security and compliance requirements so this is a big focus on how we use Smartsheet.

Smartsheet has mostly been used as the official project management tool for strategic projects - for their management and also reporting to the Executive and the Board. Dashboards are my world 😍 but as all our reports need to be included in a Word document 🙄 we 'MacGyver' a lot!

Other things we've created:

A tool kit for tracking overtime to be taken as Time in Lieu of being paid overtime rates (this might be just an Australian thing?). It is a thing of beauty, if I do say so myself.

Business planning mechanism including tracking against KPIs.

A connector (using forms and workflows for notifications) between a mental health referral intake team and the team who manage the services, to flag changes in services or problems encountered by clients.

I've been grateful to connect with @Mark Weeks who also works in govt in Australia to learn about getting the most out of Smartsheet whilst complying with data security and compliance.

I created these coffee mugs for the team I work in for Christmas presents 😁 My best days at work are creating things in Smartsheet!