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Cronos Huddle: A Revolutionary Tool Designed to Enhance Your Smartsheet Experience

Cronos Huddle: A Revolutionary Tool Designed to Enhance Your Smartsheet Experience

Check out the latest episode from Six Five Media at Smartsheet ENGAGE, where host David Nicholson chats with Frank Geraci, President of Cronos Consulting Group, Inc., about their game-changing new solution for Smartsheet: Huddle. Developed by Cronos, Huddle is designed to elevate the Smartsheet experience, offering powerful enhancements in configuration management, version control, and portal functionality.

Their conversation covers:

  • Streamlining Configuration Management in Smartsheet
  • Innovative Version Control capabilities with Huddle
  • Enhanced Smartsheet Portals and their benefits

Discover more about how Huddle is driving innovation in marketing at Smartsheet.

Watch the video below, and be sure to visit our website for all the episodes from Smartsheet ENGAGE 2024.

Or listen to the audio here:

Disclaimer: Six Five Media is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.

Transcript:

David Nicholson: Welcome to Smartsheet ENGAGE here in lovely Seattle, Washington. I’m Dave Nicholson with Six Five Media On the Road. And I’ve got a very special guest, Mr. Frank Geraci, president of Cronos. Frank, welcome to the show. How are you?

Frank Geraci: Thank you. It’s great to be here. Thank you so much for having me on this.

David Nicholson: It’s great to have you here. Well, to start out, tell us about Cronos. What does Cronos do? What are you all about?

Frank Geraci: Absolutely. So with Cronos, we provide consulting services to our customers for change management, governance, spinning up project management offices, and in all of those instances, we use Smartsheet as the toolset to support the rollout of that service and provide value to our customers.

David Nicholson: So does that presuppose existing Smartsheet implementation that you come in and improve, or are you coming in with Smartsheet as a toolset, and your services and secret sauce, and implementing something from ground zero?

Frank Geraci: Both of those.

David Nicholson: You do both?

Frank Geraci: Yeah, we do both.

David Nicholson: Okay, talk more about what you specifically do for folks who are using Smartsheet. There’s something called Huddle from Cronos. What’s that all about?

Frank Geraci: Yes. So during some of our implementations, we’ve identified the need for a more robust configuration management, version control, if you want to call it that. Okay, so a Huddle is a tool set that we’ve actually configured ourselves to live as an add-on to Smartsheet. So a user would be able to connect to their Smartsheet account, build what we call a Huddle. We’ve branded a Huddle as basically a collection of artifacts that is the solution. So a Huddle gives you the ability to identify all the sheets, reports and dashboards that make up your solution that you’re using in your organization, and you can track changes at the schema level.

So if our sheet has specific columns or cross-sheet references, sheet summaries or automations that are critical to how we run this organization and how we provide visibility into the health of our projects in our portfolio, we want to make sure that the integrity of that architecture is in place. And if we have a lot of users that are a part of my team that will collaborate on that, we want to know that when we roll changes out, we can track those. So we provide the ability to capture versions, like a Git repository, but for Smartsheet schema.

David Nicholson: Okay.

Frank Geraci: So now when changes are rolled out, we can basically capture that snapshot in time, log the message around what that version and always have this history of a log of all the different versions of our solution schema. Not just one sheet, but the whole solution as a whole. And in the event we need to roll something back or go back to see something, we have notes and we have the ability to provide that schema that we can roll back into the solution at any point in time.

David Nicholson: Can you give me a more specific example of how someone would leverage that capability if they had it? Or maybe even better still, what would the nightmare be-

Frank Geraci: Oh.

David Nicholson: … the nightmare scenario when you don’t have that available? What are the kinds of things that can happen?

Frank Geraci: So I’ve talked to everybody on this floor and they’ve all had nightmares because we live them day-to-day. Let’s say we have a project team that manages the PMO. We have seven people on our project team that administers the PMO solution that’s running on Smartsheet. And then on the PMO side, we have the tool set out to 200 users that are daily managing all their different tasks and activities. All that data rolls up to metric sheets, which basically a collection of data, you process it, you add formulas, you capture all that stuff, which then rolls up to dashboards. If somebody on the team of seven makes a change to a column, or to a link, or to a summary field, it could drastically impact the connection or the data formula calculation that rolls up to the dashboard. So maybe in my presentation to the department heads or to the executives, my dashboard will pull up and say, “#nomatch,” or, “Invalid data type. That’s the nightmare that we all sometimes have to live or worry about because we want to make sure that our solution is always operating at peak capacity and it’s fully functional.

David Nicholson: Okay. So maybe this is me searching for stuff that I think is cool because I’m loving what I’m hearing you say, because what I’m hearing is, you guys are out engaging with folks who are using Smartsheets and other enterprise software, and you figured out how to do really cool things, maybe just for one client at first, and you’re like, “You know what? This is something everybody needs.”

Frank Geraci: Absolutely.

David Nicholson: And so you have essentially, correct me if I’m out of line here, but it sounds like you have programatized, productized, however you want to describe it, a feature that you believe and customers are embracing as something that everybody needs. So configuration management, that’s something, but Huddle includes another pillar?

Frank Geraci: Yes, that’s correct. So-

David Nicholson: Okay, and what is that other thing?

Frank Geraci: Portal interfaces.

David Nicholson: Okay.

Frank Geraci: So with the solution set that we build, typically we would provide access to the sheets, or the reports, or dynamic view, or different components to capture inputs from the project team members or stakeholders that manage the day-to-day, right?

David Nicholson: Okay.

Frank Geraci: Sometimes the interfaces might pose as a challenge for some users that aren’t technical in nature, they might require additional training. They might require additional hand-holding. They may be reluctant to take those trainings or to take the steps to learn more, so they don’t want to put their data in when it’s needed. So sometimes we have to follow up on our side to make sure that that data is actually captured when we need it. In comes portal interfaces, so Huddle allows us to not only capture all the items that are part of our solution, but we can now use those artifacts as data sources that then feed a nice web page, if you want to call it that.

We give users the ability to build up a site with a header banner. You could use a number of different types of widgets for a list display of tasks that are assigned to me or the user that’s logged in. You can have approvals. So if I were to log into my view, I can see anything that is pending my approval. I can capture conversations, discussions on those. And the beauty of it is, is it all lives on Smartsheet. We’re just adding that exterior UI interface that gives it the simplicity and the direct access to what the user needs to do without having to go through all the columns, and rows, and everything.

David Nicholson: Okay. I want to go into a little more detail on that on just the genesis of these, what I think of as two pillars of Huddle. But first, so people don’t have to wait, how does someone engage with you? If this sounds like something that they would like to implement in their Smartsheet world, what does that look like? Is it a services engagement? Is it software licensing? How do they get a hold of you? It’s Cronos with a C. Is it Cronos Consulting? What-

Frank Geraci: It’s Cronos Consulting Group.

David Nicholson: Okay. Okay.

Frank Geraci: And we provide a multitude of services. We can do consulting, we can help with building out what those solutions might look like. If you’re more mature in your organization and you might have those existing solutions, but you feel the need to add configuration management or simplify the UI to make a portal that’s easy for non-technical stakeholders, there’s a multitude of angles that you can-

David Nicholson: But it’s a services engagement.

Frank Geraci: Right, it’s a services engagement.

David Nicholson: You’re not bringing in somebody dumb with a floppy, if you remember what those are.

Frank Geraci: Yeah.

David Nicholson: You’re bringing in smart people who know Smartsheets. They know your stuff and they can get the work done.

Frank Geraci: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

David Nicholson: Okay. So back to the genesis of this. When you talk about the portal interface, what did you… Is that-

Frank Geraci: Right, it’s the portal interface.

David Nicholson: Yep. Yeah. When you talk about the portal interface part of this, versus configuration management, are those two things completely distinct? I think you connected the dots between you’re doing this configuration management, so you have access to this information. An offshoot of that is this idea of making it more accessible to non-power users. Was that an offshoot or was this a completely separate thing that you also discovered in becoming expert in working with Smartsheet customers? Are those attached or are those separate things under a single umbrella?

Frank Geraci: I personally believe they are attached because Smartsheet provides immense value, automation workflows, reporting, visibility, security, anything you can imagine. But to be a true enterprise application that provides value at the enterprise level for different departments, for different use cases, for different functions, being able to track and maintain version control for what your solution is, is critical. We’re all developers, whether we like to think so or not, we need to follow best practices for how we develop products. And our product sometimes might be code-based, or it might be no code, like on Smartsheet. So I think implementing some of those practices where we have configuration management, and going through those capture processes where we can establish a version, and then maintain a repository of versions is, at a foundational level, needed for every single solution for every single customer.

Now, the need for portals, while some might think it to be a nice-to-have, I think it’s also critical because if we have a tool that is being used by a small subset of users that are willing to learn, and adapt, and want to be a part of the Smartsheet solution, that’s great. But with a UI that is intuitive, like a mobile app, you can now expand the reach to a larger audience in the organization to bring that tool set, the automation that you put into the Smartsheet behind the scenes, you could bring that value to every stakeholder in the organization for a specific purpose.

David Nicholson: Okay. So you’re putting an abstraction layer in front of the Smartsheet smarts.

Frank Geraci: That’s correct.

David Nicholson: That makes all of that power more accessible to users that it might not be accessible to. So with the couple of minutes we have left, I want to pretend like, we were talking beforehand, you mentioned that you’ve done some running. Let’s say we meet, we do some trail running together, and you casually learn that, yeah, my company uses Smartsheet. What would the questions be that you would ask me to qualify me as someone who might be… It’s like, think you’re a great guy, Frank. What do you guys do? Well, hold on a second.

Frank Geraci: Yeah, absolutely.

David Nicholson: Smartsheet, but let’s figure out if maybe there is something we can do for you. What would you ask about my Smartsheet implementation, my environment-

Frank Geraci: Absolutely.

David Nicholson: … that would equal the sound of, wow, we can do something for you? What-

Frank Geraci: So for any use case you might have, you’re using Smartsheet for something.

David Nicholson: Right.

Frank Geraci: I would ask you, “How many people do you have on your team that manage that solution for your organization?” And you might say, “One, two, five, seven, nine.”

David Nicholson: Right.

Frank Geraci: And you’d say, “Okay, great.” And I’d say, “How do you know who makes a change and how it impacts your solution?” And you would say-

David Nicholson: We don’t. We like to live dangerously.

Frank Geraci: … “You don’t. You like to live dangerously. I like to jump out of planes without a parachute. It’s so much fun.” So in order to protect the integrity of the architecture of the solution, I would say, this gives you not necessarily control, because we could provide permissions at the role level to prevent people from making changes. But let’s say you have several admins, right? We want to be able to capture those changes, annotate them, and then have the ability to revert them back. So I would ask that question initially to open up that wound.

David Nicholson: Okay. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Frank Geraci: Drive that pain point, right?

David Nicholson: Yeah, and to be fair, I’m sure there are people who get along just fine.

Frank Geraci: Absolutely.

David Nicholson: And they manage, but you’ve got… Yeah, but if you’re offering enhancements to the feature set, that’s great.

Frank Geraci: Absolutely.

David Nicholson: Okay. So now on the portal side of things, what might the-

Frank Geraci: So on the portal side, I would ask you what your use cases are. What are you using Smartsheet for? And you might say, “Well, I have a ticketing system, so it’s a support desk tracker.” And I’d say, “Okay, great. How do you capture that?” “Well, I send the form to a person, and they fill out the form.” And then I’d say, “Okay, great. How do you provide visibility into that?” And they say, “Oh, maybe I have a dashboard.” “Okay, well, what if they have to input more information?” “Well, I’d send an update request,” and while all of that is great, if I put myself in the customer’s shoes that made that request for support, I’d want to have a portal where I can actually see live updates of my tasks, or anything that you might need for me to help resolve that request for more information or whatever I need to close that out with you.

So we would give that use case a portal that would have the ability to find a service catalog, or a request catalog, or just simply submit requests directly. And then in my view, I would be able to track all the different requests. I would only see maybe the title, what my status is on that request, if information is needed from me. I can then respond, provide attachments for context, all in one portal. And the beauty of the portal is that’s one use case, but I can add all my use cases to that same portal or create offshoot portals to where now that’s the employee hub, that workforce hub or the non-technical user can go to interact with all your solutions, to get their job done quickly and easily.

David Nicholson: Excellent. Excellent. I had no idea. We’ve been running together for months. I had no idea. You know what, Frank, I’m going to instruct someone in my IT organization to take a meeting with your team to talk about this.

Frank Geraci: Absolutely. Let’s sprint to the finish.

David Nicholson: Any final thoughts on what people need to know about Kronos or Huddle?

Frank Geraci: That’s a great question. So-

David Nicholson: How long have you guys been in business? Let’s get some bona fides down.

Frank Geraci: How long?

David Nicholson: Yeah.

Frank Geraci: We’ve been, established the business in 2011 out of San Diego, and we’ve been able to grow the team across the whole country. So after COVID, we’ve all gone remote and we’re staying remote. So we’re happy to bring anybody and any one on the team that can provide any service experience to our customers and potential customers. We want to make sure that we bring the right people and industry experts, to make sure that not only can we build the tool set, but we want to build the process around that tool set, the change around that tool set, to make sure that adoption rate is high, because adoption rate for us means a successful implementation, right?

David Nicholson: Fantastic. Frank Geraci.

Frank Geraci: Yep.

David Nicholson: President Chronos Consulting. Go look up Huddle, see if it makes sense for you. I get excited by this, specifically because it’s interesting to see. It’s one thing to hear from customers. It’s another thing to hear from actual folks from Smartsheet. But when you realize that the platform is powerful enough to attract an ecosystem of quality companies like Chronos, that is a ringing endorsement of a platform-

Frank Geraci: Absolutely.

David Nicholson: … when I see it. When no one is interested in what you’re doing, you have a problem. There’s a lot of people here who are interested in what Smartsheet is doing. So with that, I’ve got to say it’s been a great day here at Smartsheet ENGAGE in Seattle. Thanks for tuning in to Six Five Media On the Road. I’m Dave Nicholson. Look forward to seeing you again soon.

Author Information

David Nicholson is Chief Research Officer at The Futurum Group, a host and contributor for Six Five Media, and an Instructor and Success Coach at Wharton’s CTO and Digital Transformation academies, out of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business’s Arresty Institute for Executive Education.

David interprets the world of Information Technology from the perspective of a Chief Technology Officer mindset, answering the question, “How is the latest technology best leveraged in service of an organization’s mission?” This is the subject of much of his advisory work with clients, as well as his academic focus.

Prior to joining The Futurum Group, David held technical leadership positions at EMC, Oracle, and Dell. He is also the founder of DNA Consulting, providing actionable insights to a wide variety of clients seeking to better understand the intersection of technology and business.

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