Kelsey Ciarrocca really believes in working smarter, not harder. You could argue that her philosophy put the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Galveston District on the map.
The Real Estate Division cartographer was recently named USACE’s “Innovator of the Year” for her pioneering work with real-time data and Smartsheet—a cloud-based program.
You could also argue this award comes as no surprise. Late last year, Ciarrocca was named the Galveston’s District’s “Innovator of the Year” for masterminding a way to make maps more interactive and resourceful.
Ciarrocca found out about her award via an email from USACE Southwestern Division Commander Col. Kenneth N. Reed.
“I remember feeling very excited,” Ciarrocca recalled after reading the announcement and the accomplishments of the other USACE 2022 innovation award winners.
“It made me happy to see all the incredible work being done out there, but also really honored to receive [the award],” she said.
The 28-year-old Virginia native changed the Corps’ real estate game last year when she figured out a way to create remotely accessible, real-time maps.
Ciarrocca’s work involves supporting project delivery teams—made up of District staff and contractors—who do most of their work out in the field. This includes a lot of going door-to-door securing critical rights-of-entry (ROE) from private landowners to access properties. Without the ROEs, the Real Estate Division can’t conduct important surveys and geotechnical investigations.
It became crucial for her team to know which properties they did and didn’t have access to. It was also critical for them to know of any hazards they might encounter on a property, like alligators. (*A real estate specialist came face-to-face with a large gator once.) Ciarrocca saw the need for web-accessible, detailed maps that could give her team useful information about the properties to make their field work more efficient and safer. She researched programs to integrate into the District’s geospatial information systems (GIS) that could keep track of the ROEs and give her real estate colleagues more insightful data on individual properties.
Ciarrocca found Smartsheet, a software used to track project progress and share documents. What followed was a testament to her dedication to getting the job done and her unorthodox thinking.
Getting the ROE data onto Smarsheet was no problem, Ciarrocca recalled. Updating that data onto the District’s GIS—a dreary endeavor—was. That’s when she really immersed herself into learning a new skill and paid out of pocket to learn application programming interface (API).
It didn’t take long for Ciarrocca to get proficient enough to make the transfer of ROE data onto the geospatial mainframe happen instantaneously. “Now we have live data in Smartsheets and in our GIS,” Ciarrocca said. “It’s been a natural progression.”
In a nutshell, she took large amounts of data, which would normally take days to process, and made it digestible for USACE and other entities to better work together. On top of that, Ciarrocca made the information accessible within fractions of a second.
“I wanted to create interfaces and processes that would make it easier for everybody involved to execute,” she said.
Her innovation didn’t just resonate with the real estate folks in Galveston; the entire enterprise took note.
Ciarrocca is now working on securing a contract to make Smartsheet available for all of USACE.
Though excited about making a positive impact, she credits her team for adopting her innovation and spreading it throughout the organization.
“If I made stuff and no one used it, I’d be irrelevant,” Ciarrocca joked.
“I think it boils down to Kelsey’s spirit of collaboration and desire to help people,” said Nichole Schlund, a real estate specialist who has worked with Ciarrocca since 2018. “If there’s a process she can make better or easier for someone, she will figure it out.”
“Kelsey’s ability to creatively solve problems and analyze a challenge … really distinguishes her from her peers,” said Brian Murphy, Ciarrocca’s supervisor. “[She] has a unique ability to find effective and practical solutions to most GIS, coding, and automation issues that we encounter in the Real Estate Division.”
“Not making it happen is not an option,” Ciarrocca said about her approach to problem solving. “When taking something on, I execute it the best I can at the time. Then I refine it from there to make it better over time.”
With her inherent helpfulness, creative approach, and desire for improvement, Ciarrocca is now charting a course into new territory.
The seasoned map maker is now creating templates for other districts to replicate her trailblazing idea of getting Smartsheet and the Corps’ GIS data to work in sync.
“It’s been really cool to make what we do at Galveston a standard practice across the Corps of Engineers,” Ciarrocca said. “That’s what’s most exciting to me.”
For more news and information, follow us on Facebook, www.facebook.com/GalvestonDistrict, Twitter, www.twitter.com/USACEgalveston.