Standardizing Reports

Team USAF-558 came to solve a consistency problem that had operational consequences: Security Forces Patrolmen lacked uniformity in how they wrote incident reports, creating inefficiencies that rippled through the entire base security apparatus.

What's At Stake

Security Forces Patrolmen serve as fact finders and information gatherers, writing reports after every dispatched situation on base. Without consistency in narrative portions of these reports, critical information gets lost, investigations slow down, and patterns become harder to identify. In security operations, unclear reporting isn't just inefficient—it's a vulnerability.

Getting to Ground Truth in Vegas

Led by Gabriel Aguirre under instructor David Riel, Team USAF-558 understood that reporting problems aren't solved in theory—they're solved where reports actually get written. Their sponsor, Sgt. Eric Ring, facilitated access to his base in Las Vegas, Nevada, where the team could observe how patrolmen would actually use their platform.

"From my experience developing websites," Aguirre explained, "the way people say they will use an application differs from the way they use it in practice. Understanding this difference will help us turn our system from theoretical to practical."

The team's approach was direct: meet patrolmen on the ground, observe actual reporting workflows, and test their assumptions against operational reality. Over four hours, they conducted nine interviews and met two additional beneficiaries they had never previously spoken to.

Operators of Another Kind

Gabriel Aguirre, leading the effort from Carnegie Mellon, brought development experience to security reporting challenges. Working alongside teammates Simeon Olawale-Apanpa, Ke Hao Chen, and Saanika Chauk, he assembled a team capable of translating reporting inconsistencies into systematic solutions.

Under instructor David Riel's guidance, they operated within the lean framework, treating every hypothesis as something to be tested against ground truth rather than assumed from distance.

What Comes Next

The Las Vegas visit delivered exactly what the team needed: 100% sign-off from every beneficiary directly involved in the workflow, from patrolmen through the base commander. More importantly, it created buy-in across decision-makers, end-users, and the people who would ultimately implement their solution.

The team now has clear action items for delivering their reporting platform to the base, with the confidence that comes from testing assumptions against operational reality.

They didn't just design a reporting system. They built it where reports actually get written.