If you have been following the recent blogs of my colleagues, the collection portrays an interesting tapestry of middle-class USA. They write about people, specifically about traits like experience and wisdom, effort versus skill, and the status of modern day written communication.

WHO CARES?

That only applies to Gen-X and Baby Boomers

Apparently, the 21st century’s impression of you is reduced to your ability to articulate an entire hypothesis in 140 Twitter characters, how great your Facebook page is, your count of followers on LinkedIn, and how tech savvy you are. “Old school” values like those depicted in the blogs don’t seem to matter anymore, especially to Millennials and Gen Z.

Marketers tend to focus on a lot of energy on Millennials. Their lives are deconstructed on many different levels, and there’s research to be found on anything ranging from their top financial goals to the ways in which they use their phones. Those analyses are all helpful in their own right, but—stepping back to the big picture for a moment—how many of these prized individuals are there in the U.S.? Data from the Census Bureau gives a sense of how large this coveted generation is:

• (Millennials) Born between 1981 – 1996: 72.26 million

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that Millennials will increase their labor force by nearly 4.5 million over the 2019-2029 decade, the largest gain for a single age group. By 2030 this hyper-connected, savvy generation will make up 75% of the workforce.

Millennials are accustomed to being connected anywhere, at any time. As Alastair Mitchell wrote in Wired:

Millennials are a generation that will seek to solve problems themselves and if they’re not satisfied with the technology being offered to them, they’ll find something else to use. While 16% of office workers use Dropbox to store work documents, this rises to 31% of 18-24-year olds and 24% of 25-31-year olds. 22% of both age groups also use Google Drive and 29% of 18-24-year olds use iCloud.

Millennials are not just influencing the direction of software but driving expectations and forcing supplies to evaluate and revise “old school” business processes to accommodate the 21st century business model.

Software developers, like Spitfire Management, who accept change and endorse, rather than ignore, the Millennial force will flourish.

A founding principle of Spitfire is the requirement to be on the leading edge of technology. So how have we responded to the Millennial force for years?

Here is a short list about our Spitfire Project Management System; our roadmap for the future is even more exciting.

• 2003 Web/cloud-based project management
• 2004 Integration with Microsoft Office suite
• 2005 Advanced web/cloud collaboration
• 2008 Optional ERP extensions
• 2010 Android mobile app
• 2012 API’s streamlining system integration
• 2014 Multi-Cloud cloud to “play well in the sandbox with others”
• 2014 Cloud synchronization with Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
• 2016 Active cloud synchronization version control with audit trails
• 2021: New, more intuitive user interface

To pull this off we relied on some “old school” traits like experience, wisdom, effort, skill and communications. So, while we learn from the Millennials, we still have a thing or two to offer them too. Maybe they do care!

If you are looking for a project management application that will keep your company on the leading edge of market demands, give us a call.