Can Mind Maps Make You More Productive?
| Situation: You Need to Organize All of This "Doing More With Less". Recently we spoke with Michael Deutch, Chief Evangelist for MindJet, who offered us some insight into how people achieve productivity gains through the use of Mind Mapping. I know from personal experience that a mind mapping approach can be very useful in collaboration, but I thought it would be interesting to get some specific examples that could generate some conversation about the way we work and how it can be improved. Michael makes some great points here. Once you read through it, please feel free to comment or start new discussions in Christine Sellers’ MindMapping GIG.  Q. I’ve found that concepts presented in Mind Map form are generally easier to understand because of the way the information is broken down hierarchically. A project WBS is naturally easy to work with in this format. Can you provide examples beyond the WBS in the project management world where the hierarchy construct is particularly useful? A. When I first learned about mind mapping, I had heard that it was mostly used for project management. One of the first applications people think of is the building of the WBS. Others take it a step further and use mapping software to also manage their schedule. Mind mapping is an excellent way to visualize your individual or team’s thinking. The visualization process helps bring to light the information that is known and the gaps that are missing. It can be used effectively to identify project risks and develop mitigation plans. Others have applied it as part of their problem solving process. Many use our software to facilitate brainstorming sessions and then organize and prioritize ideas within the structure of the map. These examples are individual instances where you’ll find utility. As part of the project management process, mapping can be used as a team process to accelerate project meetings. At a PMI conference, a customer shared his story how creating project charters used to take 5+ days before he tried mind mapping. Today, he projects a mind map and uses our software to guide the entire process in less than 3 hours. Here a list of some areas where mapping has been applied effectively: • Capturing and organizing project research • Solving problems and creating strategies for mitigating serious risks • Creating project dashboards, tying together disparate information & providing the ‘big picture’ • Drafting and writing reports and presentations • Identifying milestones and required deliverables • Gathering requirements and conducting interviews • Analyzing stakeholders and project influences • Taking project and meeting notes Q. I’ve worked with Word docs collaboratively online and its helpful, but I think that dealing with the same information is sometimes easier in Mind Map form (at least in the early stages) because its easier to see where things fit into the “visual outline”. It invites people in to add blurbs and bubbles in a way that you might not do with a Word doc because its harder to figure out where new ideas fit. What types of collaborative project situations do you see mind maps working best in? A. Working with Mind Maps collaboratively has several key benefits. Working linearly with written documents, presentations, spreadsheets and even project plans is often challenging because the details are spread across multiple pages (and even multiple applications), making it difficult to maintain perspective, see the big picture, and understand how all the pieces fit together. In the first answer, I mentioned several project situations where mapping collaboratively is effective. A general rule of thumb would be if you don’t know the answer, map it out. Throughout the project process, you can map everything from your project charter to your lessons learned report. Q. Mind Mapping can lead to more effective problem solving by helping break down the problem first so you truly understand it. Can you provide an example of how that would work in the context of a project? A. Absolutely. Project teams are constantly solving one problem or another. Using maps, teams can systematically clarify problems as they are discovered. A team can start with the ‘problem’ in the center of the map and then branch out with the following questions: a. What can you see that causes you to think there's a problem? b. Where is it happening? c. How is it happening? d. When is it happening? e. With whom is it happening? f. Why is it happening? g. What else do we need to investigate? Once these questions are fully explored and answered, it should be possible to write a clear, specific problem statement. For complex problems, teams can repeat the process above until you have described all related problems. On projects, this keeps teams focused on addressing and solving the ‘real’ problems, making incremental, measurable progress, and providing business value sooner. Q. I’ve heard that Mind Mapping is good for gathering input from folks who are coming at an issue from wildly different perspectives. Can you provide an example of that? A. Many organizations are using mind mapping as part of their requirements gathering process. This takes place in the traditional project settings (e.g. IT and R&D projects) as well as areas that aren’t always considered projects (e.g. gathering client requirements as part of a sales process). Judith Glaser of the Creating We Institute has said that within a team, mind mapping helps “create broader perspectives around ideas—to build bigger frameworks that include many peoples´ perspectives and connect them—which creates amazing inclusivity.” David Wilson, Managing Director of Elearnity, has said that mind mapping helps his team “clearly structure ideas and information from all sources, support creative thinking, structure analysis and recommendations.” Q. If you have to name a top 5 best practices for using Mind Maps to make you more productive, what would they be? A. 1. Pick up a mind mapping book or check out some mind mapping blogs to learn the basics. Then forget the rules and start mapping. 2. Let your ideas flow without judgment. You can organize and prioritize them afterwards. 3. Use keywords for your topics. You don’t have to be overly verbose. This makes it easier to grasp the big picture without getting lost in a sea of text. 4. Use notes, images & colors to provide richer context. 5. For teams, build maps together. You’ll create great ideas together, walk away more aligned, and have fun in the process! Also, one last point: maps are reflections of what’s on (or in) your mind. It isn’t always safe to assume that someone who wasn’t present when the map was created can pick it up and follow along without additional explanations. Q. What’s the best way to measure or demonstrate productivity gains from using mind maps? How would I prove it helps? A. My advice would be to not only look for productivity gains, but also at the Quality of your work and the Impact of making better decisions. In other words, if you used a mind map to arrive at a decision to cancel a project before spending millions and wasting time pursuing the wrong problem, how would that calculate in a simple survey? Demonstrating productivity for any software that improves your thinking process is a difficult challenge, especially since no two projects are alike. Mindjet has developed a survey with Forrester Research that we’ve used to collect over 1,800 responses across several global organizations. The survey took ‘before’ and ‘after’ snapshots that captured both quantitative and qualitative feedback around time spent in projects, meetings, developing communications and managing information. The results? Dramatic. Most organizations yielded 3-5 hours in savings per employee per week. Several organizations reported much higher savings. Q. MindManager Web seems to be a good environment for collaborating on issues or projects where security is not an issue. Can you provide real world examples of these types of projects (in a typical business context)? A. Our clients are using either MindManager Web or Mindjet Connect to work on maps together collaboratively from different locations, use the web conferencing capabilities to give presentations and share information across distributed project teams and share project documentation in secure workspaces. The Center Communications Director at the Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) shared that collaborative mapping has helped his team, “simultaneously collaborate on maps with distributed individuals. We also used Mindjet Connect to share documents as well as share desktops. It proved to be an invaluable productivity tool when working with a distributed group of people to keep everyone on track and up to date.” Other project managers have used it to work more directly together, follow up with progress on projects, manage team "to-do" lists, and deliver presentations and hold collaborative brainstorming sessions with remote participants. |
Posted on: March 09, 2009 07:23 PM
| Permalink |
Comments (5)
Why Project Managers Should Twitter
Situation: You're Tweet-curious. How many times have you heard that project management is all about communication? Communicating with your team is important, but so is communication with the outside world. The latter is one of the reasons you are on gantthead. Both are reasons you should at least become familiar with Twitter.Let me begin by saying I’ve been on Twitter for almost two years, tweeting once until last week. I never really got it until I got a few direct messages that dragged me into really trying it out. Three benefits really struck me as important. I think they could be important to most PMs who care about doing a good job AND improving their knowledge of the field. Real Large-Scale Collaboration Have you ever been responsible for a large-scale system rollout? Often there are points where you present information to a large audience and only a small percentage of people with questions ask them. In the end you have questions from 5% of the people who actually have issues with what you are doing. Imagine what would happen if you got everything out in a non-confrontational and documented way with very little overhead or cost. Twitter could help you do that. How important is “sounding smart” (or being smarter) to you? You would be surprised at how inspirational a twitter stream of random thoughts and links on PM can be. It’s hard not to spend 10 minutes running through a twitter search of something you are interested in --- say project management and not find something that interests you or sparks your imagination. Compare that to 10 minutes of TV at night or 10 minutes of waiting in line someplace. How important is being connected to you? If you want to connect to business people in general, go to linkedin. If you want to connect to other PMs, do that on gantthead. If you want to connect to people from a variety of disciplines, based on your interests, Twitter is not a bad place to do it. Again, start by searching on your favorite terms. Last night, I ended up having a brief email exchange with one of the guys on NBCs “Heroes”. No big deal, but not likely to happen without Twitter. How many PM folks do you network with? Wouldn't it be great if you knew more about them - creating easier ways to start conversation and build a closer relationship? (see video below) These are just a few thoughts on the subject. It’s not for everyone. It’s certainly not for those who have a very modest interest in networking. I just thought it would be useful to offer a couple quick ways to try it out. If you do try it, please let me know how it turned out. If you would like to follow me, I'm DaveG253. |
Posted on: March 02, 2009 04:12 PM
| Permalink |
Comments (27)
Convert PDFs to Word files -- pretty accurately
Situation: You need to pull content out of a PDF into MS Office. Just a quick posting about a useful tool. I think that many of us have had a PDF that we wish we could edit at one point or another. Here is a tool that will turn your PDF into a Word doc so that you can do what you want with it.I was surprised at how well this tool worked. I think you will be too. They also promise to: - never sell your email address - destroy the copy of the doc you upload immediately, without looking at it. |
Posted on: February 28, 2009 09:40 PM
| Permalink |
Comments (8)
A PM Competency GAAP?
| Situation: You need a way to measure the competency of Project Managers – or your own. Recently, I was trying to answer a question from a member who needed a way to measure competencies of the PMs that reported to him. The first approach that came to mind was the PMI Project Manager Competency Framework. I happened to have the Second Edition (2007) on my bookshelf. I also remembered a serious and ongoing effort to create a sort of open Source competency framework, undertaken by the Global Alliance for Project Performance Standards. The latter is a free, somewhat simpler framework than the PMI version. I think that either is better than nothing. However, competency rating is such a tricky thing to start with – such measures should be viewed within the context of other performance measures in place. In other words, I wouldn’t consider them as a fair way to select a bottom 10% to lay off. These are better used as a way to identify potential areas of improvement so that people can work on “sharpening the saw”. Here are a few quick observations I made about the two approaches. Please feel free to comment or add your experiences with either. PMI Framework = Comprehensive, but Critical Measures May Be Soft As you might expect, the PMI framework is aligned with the PMBOK. I really like the more granular focus on personal abilities, but I also know these are likely the most difficult to accurately assess. GAAP Framework = Easier to Measure Metrics, No Skills Coverage The GAAP framework is a simpler structure and seems to focus more on ending projects well. All in all, I think that the GAAP approach focuses on the things that are easier to measure. I think that gives you a more accurate view of “what happened”. The PMI approach is more ambitious, covering those critical skills that truly great PMs need to be successful. For example, under professionalism there are performance criteria for “Demonstrates commitment to the project”. The Performance Criteria cover very important issues like “Understands and actively supports the project’s and organization’s mission and goals”. The types of evidence are examples of when the PM has taken positive steps toward meeting the criteria. This is a great way to gather proof points, but proof that you did good things doesn’t mean that there weren’t as many bad things done on your watch on that same project.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Posted on: February 25, 2009 02:39 PM
| Permalink |
Comments (6)
What's Next in Agile?
| Situation: You need a practical perspective on Agile approaches. Alan Shalloway is the founder and CEO of Net Objectives. With more than thirty-five years of experience, Alan is an   industry thought leader, trainer, and coach in the areas of lean software development, the lean-agile connection, Scrum, agile architecture and using design patterns in agile environments. He is a popular speaker at prestigious conferences worldwide. Alan is the primary author of Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design and is currently writing a book on Lean Anti-Patterns. He is also a frequent trainer and speaker for SQE Training.We recently got a few of his thoughts on the state of Agile and how its being applied. Q. We've been hearing a lot about SCRUM and Lean lately on Gantthead. Are you still seeing increased usage of Agile processes in the IT space? In other disciplines? A. Agile process continue to increase in both the IT space and in product development. All areas of software development are adopting it. Scrum has caught on in many areas because of its ability to solve certain problems regarding the development team reasonably easily. Lean is catching on because although it is easy to start with Scrum, dealing with the more involved challenges of spreading Agile beyond the team requires more than Scrum readily provides. Q. Which flavor of Agile is most popular right now and why? Are the flavors industry-specific? A. Scrum is definitely the most popular. It has jumped to the forefront for several reasons: 1) It has created a community of practitioners that are very vocal about its benefits and whom make a living from being certified by the Scrum Alliance 2) Merely forming Scrum teams in many IT organizations will result in increased team productivity because of the co-location and minimizing thrashing which results 3) It is a straightforward way to enable teams to adopt iterative development, which is inherently a more effective approach in most cases Unfortunately, Scrum is proving difficult to scale to the entire enterprise. Even at the team level, Scrum evangelists acknowledge Scrum fails about two-thirds of the time. The Scrum community has tried to expand its definition from its original objective to helping teams to trying to help the entire enterprise. This bottom-up approach is not effective. It is much better to start with an approach that is designed to optimize the entire enterprise and work down. Q. In general, where do you think the Agile movement is headed over the next 5 years? A. As Agile moves more from local teams to the entire enterprise, you will see Agile teams embracing Lean principles as the primary driver. This is what we call Lean-Agile: using Lean thinking to create a context for Agile principles and practices. We (Net Objectives and SQE) have already started this transition as our clients have been on the forefront of taking Agile methods throughout their organizations. Lean is based on principles that have a half-century history of success. Q. What is driving the change you've just described? A. While teams can solve the impediments they face at the team level with the "inspect and adapt" mandate of Scrum, the challenges in their way at the Enterprise level require the proven practices of Lean thinking. Lean is a thought process that can be used in any industry to speed up delivery while improving quality and achieving lower costs. Lean thinking is very consistent with the intent of Agile and Scrum. It therefore provides great insights into how to solve problems agile teams and organizations face. Q. The latest version of the PMBOK is said to address the merging of Agile methods and the PMBOK approach. What are your thoughts on that? A. Trying to merge XP and Scrum (the two most popular Agile methods) may prove difficult. Practitioners of XP and Scrum often have quite strong resistance to management and process, defending the local team at nearly all cost. To be successful, Lean thinking will be required as a starting point Lean thinking defines process as the agreement by an organization about how work is done; in addition, it expects processes to change as better ways of working are discovered. It affirms the value of both standard work and local knowledge. Process becomes the baseline for change. As long as PMBOK does not consider process to be static, PMBOK and Lean-Agile can be somewhat complimentary. Q. When approaching projects from an Agile perspective, what are the most important skills for a PM to have? A. Be focused on results not on following the process. The process should assist the team because it helps them get their job done. You cannot impose a process on a team. The PM is not a servant leader as many say in the Agile world. Rather, they are providing leadership to the team, improving the process which the team works while staying focused on having the team provide business value. Leadership, communication and coaching skills are essential for the effective PM. |
Posted on: February 05, 2009 04:48 PM
| Permalink |
Comments (7)
