Welcome to our latest and greatest Conspire series, “MindManager Showcase,” featuring none other than — you guessed it — Mindjet MindManager. From working as traditional project managers in non-traditional organizations, to overseeing high-level international communications, we know our loyal users need tools that can capture head-to-toe information and keep them ahead of the productivity game. And so, to highlight some of our favorite MindManager features, we’ll take you through a variety of situations that many of our customers face in their daily work lives. Sit back and enjoy!
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Robin’s Role and Needs
Robin is a certified project manager for a small start-up in San Francisco. Although her company includes only 17 employees, she often finds herself managing more than 10 different projects at once. These include individual marketing campaigns and larger collaborative projects, like multi-faceted campaigns and the creation of content assets. She is the only person in her company with a certification in project management. Her title is General Project Manager, and as a result, she is consulted on a variety of initiatives by everyone in her organization. She needs a project and task-management tool that will help her streamline and track tasks, schedules, budgets, and communications across teams.
Her Major Pain Points
- No formal teams are assigned to complete projects; work must be fit into each group’s functional responsibilities
- Robin has been trained as a traditional project manager, but the rest of the organization is not familiar with a PM’s typical roles and responsibilities
- Vague but highly important expectations from all employees
- No department-specific training in the PM role
Today’s Problem
Robin’s company has a software release coming up in just over a week. She has been tasked with overseeing A/B market testing for the first month after the release. She needs to quickly and easily gather all requirements from key stakeholders, determine the primary goals they are going to achieve with this project, find out what the MVP is for this first release, and track key milestones and deliverables at each point in the process.
How MindManager Can Help
MindManager enables Robin to create a map for each of the individual projects that she is working on during this release. Frequently, she will need to call a quick meeting, or project a map at a stand-up and get input from the whole team, that she can then visually display in the map. MindManager allows her to include links to key information on the web, attachments and notes for specific topics, and images to act as visual cues as they move through the project definition process. If the team has a disagreement, or runs into a problem that they cannot quickly solve, she uses the map as a way to brainstorm solutions, and to categorize pros and cons of possible solutions. Once a decision has been reached, the map acts as a record of what options were considered and how the final decision was reached. When the requirements are completed and prioritized, she can also include top-level details like dates, deliverables and budget.
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