I have been a user of Mindjet’s products since 2003. I used mindmapping for group collaboration and getting the thoughts in people’s heads on one page. The clarity my clients experience from the collaboration gets us on the same page on what needs to be done.
One of the things that an effective mindmap can do well is itemize tasks and help the team understand what needs to be done in context of a large amount of responsibilities. The mindmap provides context for a larger picture and everything that needs to be done.
Furthermore, details that are important to a team can be broken down to granular parts. A well-built mindmap will have the following components:
- Ideas. These tend to be towards the center of a mindmap and are more conceptual in nature. Distinct thoughts and themes need to be broken up rather than a node. This will allow for branching on main ideas and themes.
- Strategies. These answer the “How” for the ideas. How things will get done, resources that may need be required and any relevant impacts on an idea should be captured as a subset of an idea.
- Action. The tasks that are relevant to the idea need to be at the outer ends of the map. These can also be captured in a separate floating topic as well if having the tasks in one consolidated view is easier to manage.
The tasks can be labeled with the task icons. This creates accountability in the map with updates on status and who is responsible. Within Mindjet Connect, the map itself can be converted to Action. This translates and integrates the tasks to a list form. Both are associative, thus updates to the visual view in the map or the linear form in the task list are reflected in the other.
Using a desktop version with Outlook also has the same effect. Tasks can be created from a map into Outlook tasks and managed from a personal console.
If you are delegating and managing a team’s effort, then use the mindmap in a collaborative fashion for follow-up and tracking. Your team members can also update each task node accordingly as well.
The advantage is that the thinking and decisions can be seen in one visual view with respect to the action the team decided upon.
How can this type of task management work for you?
