Managing Projects with Mindmaps
A MindMap was introduced by by British popular psychology author and television personality Tony Buzan. Mr. Buzan designed a graphical way to represent ideas and concepts. The MindMap is a visual thinking tool that helps structure information and generate new ideas. Just as in every great idea, its power lies in its simplicity.
Project Managers are constantly challenged with projects that need to be managed, communicated, and visualized to the creative stakeholder. A mindmap is an excellent solution to overcome this challenge. Mindmaps afford projects the opportunity to manage, integrate, and report the creative process to image conscious teams.
Executive, Team, & Individual Project Management
Stakeholder accountability is imperative when working with valuable clients through the creative process. What team members are associated with which associated tasks within the process? The process usually involves a large team with each piece being responsible for the sophisticated project delivery. A mindmap provides the ability to manage the process at a high level without micro managing details. The project manager can visualize the entire process much like the daily life of an executive. However, what makes a mindmap even more powerful is the ability to drill down to a micro level of detail in an effort to manage projects at the team and even individual levels.
Integration
There are many amazing technologies available to today’s project management professional. There are Excel spreadsheet programs great for assisting with the task management of a project. There are Calendar technologies available to collaborate ideas in a shared space. There are Cloud solutions designed to share information and provide a frame work for productivity. The issue presented when working with all of these technologies is integration. How can I manage the productivity gained by using technology like Excel, Calendar, & Cloud?
Mindmapping offers the perfect fit to work with many other applications. Regardless of where your data is coming from, a well designed mindmap will import it. In fact, a mindmap can also export data to many other file formats and applications as well. Here is a summary of integrations with other applications and technologies.
Reporting
How does a project manager report activities, resources, and schedules to the “Gannt Chart Challenged” individual? How can a project manage this content when some, or all, data changes at any given time? It is difficult to manage a project with the creative process that can be easily shared with the client.
Mindmaps help project managers organize project plans that can be presented with ease to the stakeholders. They empower the creative teams to organize and schedule resources, people, equipment and services. Mindmaps start with a creative blank canvas that can adapt to real time data changes at any given point in the project. The end result is viewed as art by the user that truly embraces the creative process.
Reporting information in a visual format empowers project teams to digest information from different perspectives:
Net Plan
Merlin Project’s Net Plan lets you turn your full attention to the dependencies of activities on each other. The logical display of relationships between activities helps you when entering the project’s underlying structure - and of course when reviewing the critical path.
MindMap
When planning a project, do you prefer the visual way of doing things or do you often plan projects together with customers? With the Mind Map in Merlin Project, you have precisely the right tool. Create a conceptual version of your project plan as a mind map, and Merlin Project will transfer automatically what you have entered to the project’s work breakdown.
Organizational Chart
If you prefer structured thinking, you will love our organizational chart. With it, you will grasp the hierarchical makeup of your project plan in a snap. And by the way, this kind of presentation is one of the most important standards in project management.
Managing Projects with Mindmaps
Mindmaps manage executive, team, and individual components of the project accountable for the activities that need to be completed. Mindmaps provide the project framework to integrate with most project management information from a wide variety of sources. Mindmaps even provide a blank canvas to report project information to the creative visual audience. It is for these reasons that a mindmap is an excellent choice to manage the creative process in your organization.
About ProjectWizards
Merlin Project is a software solution built by ProjectWizards used to manage projects for the apple business community. We believe that good software gives people the power to perform complex tasks with ease. For this reason, we are working hard to afford you the opportunity to experience our magic with project management applications. This is why, from day one, we have used the Apple macOS and iOS platforms as the best possible environment for our products. We work remotely from many beautiful locations in Germany and the USA, and still act as one cohesive team. A large network of reliable global partners helps us realize our notion of software worldwide.
