Cognitive mapping software automates processes for graphically diagramming words, ideas and tasks, which can give project teams and managers added insight in planning, transforming the way they make decisions and solve problems. Here’s how it helped an AT&T program manager optimize a complex IT project.
The stakes were high. Dave Davis was leading a meeting to launch a billion-dollar information technology project for one of AT&T’s largest global corporate customers. His goal, as program manager for the telecom company’s E-bonding unit, was to map out a toolset that would allow the client’s hundreds of divisions and thousands of employees around the world to complete myriad transactions — from a repair ticket on hardware to a speaker phone procurement — electronically. It would have to support, as Davis put it, “an entire I-tel framework of tools” that used XML programming to create application-to-application integration between customers and suppliers that would take an order, route it, chart its lifecycle, and incorporate updates.
At the complex project’s kick-off meeting, most of the notes were listed outline-style on a large white-board; a bullet-pointed brainstorm of action lists, causal relationships and prerequisites. Around the edges were a series of yellow sticky notes, each with barely legible and smudged