The November 15 Economist features a review of the latest book by Donald Tapscott, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World. Tapscott defines the Net Generation as individuals born between 1978 and 1994.

My best takeaway from the review is about meeting this generation where it is, through a better understanding of their expectations of what work is and how it should work.

“Two out of three Net Geners feel that ‘working and having fun can and should be the same thing.’”

“They…expect collaboration, constant feedback, and rapid career advancement based on merit.”

Our November Roadmap will get us back on track after an October detour. For Release 2.4 we are planning to:

• implement a flex version of the add/edit project functionality
• add a quick edit to allow changes to be made to selected projects en masse
• change the login and help screens to provide more relevant data at a glance
• enhance permissions to give a manager full rights over anything in their tree

Aside from improved usability, users should experience a speed increase as more of the application will be reached from flex, reducing annoying reloads. The quick edit will also make the application more intuitive, and make it easier to bring work up to date.

Responding quickly to a couple of user requests, we released version 2.3.5 last night. This includes enhancements to reporting including a billability report, and the ability to save report presets. Click on the reports tab to check it out. 

Complete documentation will be released with the 2.3.6 release.

The October roadmap is exciting. Look for an:

• Exception report
• Billability report
• Editing multiple projects and tasks
• More Flex integration
• Enhanced communication of new features

A quick release last night responds to some user requests. Specifically, 2.3.3:

-Changes the MyProjects view in MyPositiveWare from a table to a tree.
-Makes terminology for the actual timecard configurable.
-Remembers how you have the Project Manager tree opened and closed both when you navigate away from it and between sessions.
-Allows users to change all notification settings at once.

Release notes for this release will be integrated with those for our next release.

Just got out of the Rockies Venture Club Planning Day. The gist of the conversation was around the market that RVC serves. Is it service providers, who are a steady presence in the organization? Is it angels without whom no deals happen? Or is it the entrepreneurs who create the deal flow to begin with, and yet need funding and services to be successful.

A second topic was the perception that RVC is misunderstood. Many people come to RVC thinking the organization is a funding source. It is not that, but it is much more. As Franklin said, “We don’t write checks. But our friends do.” The truth is that an entrepreneur who needs investment will need an introduction to an angel to have any likelihood of success. For RVC this becomes the challenge of correctly articulating the value proposition.

Taken together this leads to a strategy of leveraging Colorado service providers to know and communicate the RVC story to their entrepreneur clients.

Then it got interesting, because we had a white board and and walls covered with plans, tactics, and names. And Maita serves up this softball to the effect of “We have to have a system for tracking this and holding committee chairs accountable.”

Which is, of course, the whole point of PositiveWare. Write down the plan with specificity, align tasks to the plan, and assign names to the plans and tasks. Update regularly, and a comprehensive web based performance management system is at your fingertips.