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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Felicity’s Role and Needs
Felicity is a business planner in the risk-management department of a medium-sized software company. She is responsible for performing risk evaluation and business impact analyses to adequately plan for potential financial threats and other disruptive circumstances. She is continually developing and revising business continuity strategies, emergency response policies, and operational business plans to deal with these possible circumstances. Felicity must also conduct risk assessment tests, oversee 5 employees, conduct meetings to cover and deploy risk-management practices, and train company managers on procedures for handling potential disasters. She needs a tool that will help her manage communications with outside risk-assessment agencies and management teams, document and assess priorities and strategies, track data, and translate information into coherent reports for company executives.
Her Major Pain Points
- Executives do not always agree on best practices
- Team is small, making risk-assessment challenging
- Difficulty translating various pieces of data and other info into a single, accessible report
Today’s Problem
In our posts from Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, we learned how Felicity used MindManager to efficiently guide the company management team and external contractors through the risk analysis process, present emergency response protocols to a team of auditors, and finally, outline a training course for key employees and managers. Today, Felicity is taking a look at the company-approved templates for status reports. These reports are reviewed by both the executive team and the company’s board of directors. Felicity needs a way to create one of these status reports and send them to the executive team for a monthly status update on her and her team’s key accomplishments, as well as detail any blockers that they have encountered.
How MindManager Can Help
Felicity uses a status update map to bring together key information from her team. She also uses it to highlight which issues they are going to list as accomplishments, and what blockers they will bring to the attention of the executive team. She fills out this map once a month at a special team meeting. To get everyone’s input, she displays the map for the group either through a web meeting, or by gathering everyone in a conference room. Once they are in agreement on the key points to be presented, Felicity saves the map to be used as a starting point for next month’s status meeting. She has also set up a blank company template, and uses MindManager’s customizable MS Word export capabilities to export a summary of the map contents into MS Word format. Immediately after the meeting, she can send the report off to the entire executive team for their review.
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