Chapter 14

Project Management with Mind Mapping

In This Chapter

Organising projects with Mind Maps

Time and task planning

Generating special views with filters

Like the word ‘innovation’, the terms ‘project’ and ‘project management’ are used more and more these days. In this chapter I show you that Mind Mapping can also be helpful with project management. Before starting, I first explain what I mean by ‘project management’ in this context.

There’re a number of different ways of interpreting project management:

Project management as the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities or to meet the requirements of projects.

Project management as the control, coordination, guidance and organisation of projects.

Project management viewed from the broader perspective of all management tasks, organisation, techniques and resources for initiating, defining, planning, controlling and concluding projects.

This makes Mind Mapping a tool or technique that can assist you with planning and piloting projects.

‘One Page Management’: Everything on a Single Page

The book One Page Management by Riaz Khadem and Robert Lorber appeared in the USA during the 1980s. In this book, written in the form of a novel, Brian Scott becomes the new CEO of the company X-Corp and tries in vain to gain an overview of his new firm. After a few fruitless attempts he meets ‘Infoman’, a secretive adviser who introduces the CEO to the art of One Page Management, firstly in a series of short messages and then in face-to-face meetings. The aim of One Page Management is to obtain an overview of all information relevant to the company in a three-page memo. This memo acts like the gills of a fish and filters out what’s essential from the sea of information and saves the CEO from drowning.

Mind Mapping and the way in which the technique is used for project management are rather similar. Mind Mapping enables you to concentrate all the important information you need for the successful management of a project on a single page. Hence, it prevents you from drowning in a sea of project details and helps you to:

Survey the project in its entirety.

Remain focused on the current stage at all times.

Get a better understanding of connections between the different aspects of your project.

Software is Sensible

Naturally you can do project-management Mind Mapping with a pen and paper. An example is given in Figure 14-1. It provides an overview of an online Mind-Mapping course which I prepared. Some of the tips and tricks introduced in this chapter for project management with Mind Mapping can be applied just as well with a pen and paper.

Nevertheless, I recommend using Mind-Mapping software for project management for a number of reasons:

The Mind Map can be easily altered at any time. In project management you keep having to update frequently changing content. Using a pen and paper for this is very laborious and a Mind Map with many deletions quickly becomes hard to read.

You can convert the Mind Map to other formats. Most Mind-Mapping programs allow you to convert your Mind Map to other formats, for example, for forwarding to colleagues or for further processing of its content in another program.

Mind-Mapping software offers special project-management functions. Many programs – in any case the MindManager and iMindMap programs introduced in this book – include special functions for project management that simplify your work.

Software enables you to filter Mind Maps. Some programs like Mindjet MindManager allow you to filter Mind Maps using criteria of your choice. This can be very helpful for project management, for example, the possibility of filtering individual branches that have special priority or have been assigned to a particular person.

Projects You Can Plan and Control with Mind Maps

Mind Mapping can be applied to all kinds of projects, be it a summer fete in your garden or designing an aircraft. Nevertheless, there’s a small difference between these two examples: designing an aircraft is slightly more complicated than organising your next garden party! Very complex projects may perhaps require other control and planning solutions. There is of course software to help you cope with specialised activities like these.

Nonetheless, Mind Mapping can be sensibly used to manage complex projects, for example, by keeping track of important aspects or visualising individual parts of the project. You’ve already seen some examples of that in this book.

However, most projects are nowhere near as complex as designing an aircraft. This is the case with both professional and private projects. Mind Mapping and Mind-Mapping software are ideal for projects like these.