Yesterday, Lori Schmall, COO of Grist joined us. Grist is a Seattle based on-line media company focused on the environment. Time magazine recently named Grist the top green web site.

While we like to think and act green as a company – she was quick to point out a few plastic water bottles scattered around the conference room - I think we’ve got some work to do.  Lori’s past life was in senior management at a Fortune 500 technology firm dealing with scenarios that are near and dear to our heart – enterprise product development and project management.

We focused first on our sales presentation.  We’re constantly refining it to better speak to the value of our product, keep the flow engaging and eliminate the bullet points (we believe in a bullet point free world). This reminded me I need to revisit http://www.presentationzen.com/.

Our takeaways from this discussion:

• Get the audience involved as quickly as possible. This helps keep everyone focused and involved in the presentation
• Use stories to illustrate points, it’s much more interesting for everyone
• A little humor never hurts, we all can relate to funny scenarios that we live through

We then turned to the pain of project management. Lori offered up a nice, simplified definition of requirements management: “Delivering what the customer wants”.  This speaks to the broader set of functionality that’s available within Contour.

For Lori, the #1 one pain point is when the team loses sight of what’s important to the customer.  On long, complex projects when things change, it’s easy to get disconnected from what the stakeholders are expecting.  She gave a great metaphor. It’s like an iceberg – the customer defines what they want, but it’s just the visible tip of the iceberg. The development team then has to create and manage through the supporting structure underneath the surface – the mammoth, complicated task of defining use cases, tasks, coding, testing, documenting, deploying to get to the end result of what the customer wants.

The key themes were:

• Visibility into the project – understanding what the status is at all times and who’s doing what
• Alignment – keeping everyone on the same page.

Continuing the metaphor, these strategy sessions with outside executives help us come up for air once and awhile, and keep us focused on the big picture of the value we deliver to customers.  Thanks Lori for your time.

- Tiv Socheat - mother of 2 and chicken farmer in Cambodia
- Elida Angelica Ruiz Cardenas - mother and fish retailer in Peru
- Eliseo Canales - pineapple and dragon fruit farmer in Nicaragua
- Rosemary Rushagara - mother of 4, caretaker of orphaned kids from HIV and store owner in Tanzania
- Nguyen Thi Ngat -daycare provider and educator in Vietnam

and several others…

Who are they? They aren’t customers, employees or partners. They are the first of the Kiva.org loan recipients that we’ve sponsored through our “You try. We give.” program.

What started out as a small idea during a team meeting in February has blossomed into an ongoing program that reflects our corporate values and commitment to giving back on behalf of our customers, partners and other members of our community. For every customer that trials Contour, our collaborative requirements management software, we set aside marketing dollars to donate for loans that help Kiva.org recipients improve their own communities.

We chose Kiva.org because they embody a few fundamental principles that we share:

1. a belief that the entrepreneurial spirit lives in everyone
2. thousands of micro-actions that create a cumulative macro-effect
3. taking a collaborative, Web-based approach to solving a problem
4. an open, global community of people working together for greater success

View our lender page on Kiva: http://kiva.org/lender/jamasoftware

We’re still a young company with limited funds, so as we grow, this program will grow too. We look forward to introducing the new Kiva recipients each quarter. Thanks for showing your support by evaluating Contour and enabling us to help more companies succeed with requirements management.

We’re excited about the next release as not only does it provide a long list of new features and enhancements, but it also sets in motion a series of strategic releases over the next few months that will include our public web services API, workflow and integrations with other best of breed software.

One of the many enhancements is a visual relationship mapping utility that adds to the ways you can define trace relationships within Contour.

Another one of my favorite small enhancements is the “Add Related” for adding new items with automatic links to your current item. This makes it quick to add bugs that are related to your curren test case, or a new task that is related to a use case and so on.

My other favorite small enhancement is the multi-select update. We knew it was needed and now it’s here.  Stay tuned as we count down the launch to 2.0 next week.