Stonewall Solutions builds a bridge between Azure DevOps and Smartsheet with SoftwareX, accelerating reporting and saving time

Note: We first featured Stonewall Solutions in a November 2025 post, highlighting how their PMO connected Azure DevOps and Smartsheet to eliminate manual reporting. Since then, Stonewall has expanded and matured their solution - building new reporting use cases, improving visibility for clients, and operationalizing real-time dashboards across their workflows.The story below reflects Stonewall’s current state and how their approach has evolved in Smartsheet with the Connector for Azure DevOps.

"The time required to create a dashboard like this manually every day would probably be 30 minutes to an hour. With the SoftwareX connector drawing data automatically from Azure DevOps into Smartsheet, there’s essentially no effort involved.” - Mark Fantasia, Vice President of the Project Management Organization at Stonewall Solutions.

Some of the most complex technology decisions in America happen inside state agencies and local government offices, where the stakes are high, and the margin for error is slim. Stonewall Solutions has been working in that environment since 2004, building custom software and consulting solutions for government bodies, law enforcement, and higher education institutions across New England—and increasingly beyond it. The firm is deliberately small, with about 60 people split between its New England headquarters and a development team in India, but it has built a reputation for tackling some of the region’s most demanding public-sector projects.

Two platforms that didn’t talk

Inside Stonewall, two systems play distinct but complementary roles. With Azure DevOps, the development team handles the technical side—documenting requirements, tracking bugs, and managing releases. On the other hand, Stonewall uses Smartsheet’s Intelligent Work Management platform for project support, handling everything from project portfolios, program management, and client-facing reporting. “I started using Smartsheet around 10 years ago,” says Mark Fantasia, Vice President of the Project Management Organization at Stonewall Solutions. “I really fell in love with the tool—what it brought to the table and how easy it was to use. That’s why I introduced it when I came to Stonewall.”

As a customer-facing consulting organization, Stonewall filters and updates progress information in Smartsheet for clients to view. Since the two systems weren’t connected, keeping Smartsheet dashboards up to date required manually querying Azure DevOps, exporting data to Excel, and pasting it across. The process left information stale and consumed time that project managers couldn’t afford to lose. “We needed a ‘lens’ into DevOps—a solution that would present the same data to the customer in a clean and curated way, with less effort from us,” Fantasia explains.

An intelligent, automated bridge

That’s when Fantasia discovered that SoftwareX, a Smartsheet Platinum Partner, had something that would bridge the gap between Smartsheet and Azure DevOps. Working together, Stonewall implemented Unite, Software X’s integration platform, which includes a connector designed to automatically sync Azure DevOps work items—bugs, tasks, and user stories—into structured records inside Smartsheet. “The system updates the dashboards almost in real time—currently every hour,” Fantasia explains.

To make the data easier to interpret, Stonewall paired the integration with the Smartsheet Pivot App. This allowed the team to turn raw development data into summarized, enterprise-grade views—grouped by module, priority, ownership, and how long issues have been open. Those summaries feed client-facing dashboards that now drive status meetings, giving everyone a live view of which issues sit with Stonewall, which are with the client, and what’s blocking progress.

A partner that enables scalability

SoftwareX supported the rollout throughout, providing training, onboarding, and ongoing guidance as Stonewall configured the integration. “We bring integration expertise and advisory support,” says Dan Morales, Product Manager at SoftwareX. “Our role is to help customers connect the systems they rely on, so teams can work where they need to while keeping their data aligned.”

With that foundation in place—and because the connector requires no coding—Fantasia was able to take the integration further on his own. “When customers can build integrations themselves, they can accelerate collaboration across their teams,” Morales adds. “In Mark’s case, it allowed him to create a whole new process in Smartsheet that external stakeholders can trust.” Fantasia built a dashboard to track testing progress for a large government system, giving the client a real-time view of open bugs and tasks across different modules. He is now exploring a third use case to intelligently track progress on a technology transformation project, helping teams see how far along the roadmap they are and where potential gaps may emerge.

Less effort, more transparency

One of the most immediate benefits is time savings, since teams no longer have to maintain reports manually. “The time required to create a dashboard like this every day would probably be 30 minutes to an hour,” Fantasia says. “With the SoftwareX connector drawing data automatically from Azure DevOps into Smartsheet, there’s essentially no effort involved.”

For Fantasia, the biggest advantage is unified, real-time visibility. With shared dashboards pulling live data, Stonewall’s internal teams and clients now collaborate with the same view of project progress. “With standardized data across projects, we’re not spending time in every meeting trying to align on what we were looking at,” Fantasia says. “This allows us to focus on the actual challenges and wins.” By presenting development data in a clear, business-friendly format, the dashboards give clients confidence that they are seeing accurate, up-to-date information.

A proactive, innovative mindset

That clarity has also helped the internal team move from reactive reporting to more proactive management. “By spotting trends in the data—such as aging issues or emerging bottlenecks—we can identify problems earlier and address them before they escalate,” Fantasia adds.

With automated Azure DevOps syncs, Pivot-driven summaries, and Smartsheet dashboards already in place, Fantasia is exploring ways to extend the model across other areas of client work—adding new reporting modules for forecasting, risk management, and resource visibility. “I think there’s a lot of power in bringing data from one system together with data from another,” Fantasia adds. “With artificial intelligence and everything else that’s evolving, the opportunities for leveraging this connector and this partnership will only continue to grow.”