Project Management

'X' Marks the Spot

Lee Appleyard

Topics: Work Breakdown Structures (WBS), ProjectsAtWork

Project-mapping tools can help teams see the big picture often lost in the planning process.

Is chaos and clutter a project manager's idea of fun? White boards with multicolored diagrams. Mountains of legal pads, forests of flip charts. Project leaders use many methods to kick-start the project planning phase. But despite all the accessories, countless projects move from the planning stage to assigning, scheduling and implementing, still in search of a clear, common vision. Asked to identify their biggest challenges in managing projects, more than 50 percent of 200 respondents at a recent ProjectWorld conference indicated "lack of clarity in the project scope."

    

Suffice to say, successful initial planning is crucial to project success. And many project managers are employing an approach called project mapping to help define the scope, structure and goals of the project for their team. Project maps facilitate brainstorming and enable teams to quickly collaborate and capture structured and unstructured information in digital form. Once this information is captured, it can be quickly and efficiently organized, prioritized and communicated.

 

What Is Mapping?

Project mapping packages are graphically oriented tools that use words, lines, colors, images and logic to stimulate the full range of cortical skills for greater idea development, …


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"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."

- Lewis Carroll

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