It’s almost time to down tools, abandon your desk and enjoy
this season’s festivities but before then, have you planned ahead for 2015?
1. PLANNING
Mapping out tasks, priorities and deadlines provides the
ideal format to capture, sort and categorise your own or your team’s workload.
The mapping exercise allows you to visualise everything and arrive at decisions
on workload levels, importance, priorities and what needs to be delegated.
Additional functionality enables categorisation, allocation
of resources and timescales, filtering and other mechanisms for tracking and
reporting.
We all subscribe to the adage that “failing to plan is
planning to fail”. The use of mind mapping software to organise objectives,
tasks and general workload really does help you to plan, organise and work
smarter to be that bit more thorough, efficient and effective.
2. PROJECT MANAGEMENT
The area of Project Management covers a wide and varied
spread of project types and sizes – from relatively small projects covering
short timescales, through to complex multi-faceted projects involving many
people and covering months, sometimes years of work. The size, type and nature
of any project will dictate the amount of time, resources, methodologies and
processes.
Our experience and research indicates that, regardless of
size and type, many projects fail due to poor or inadequate planning. This is
the pre-scheduling stage, the crucial up-front capture of the project requirements
and the project work breakdown structure (WBS) – the stage that everything else
hinges on, where if important aspects are missed; project success is
potentially placed under immediate risk.
The use of mind mapping software to brainstorm, capture and
structure the all-important up-front project WBS enables planning to be better
focussed and effective. This highly visual way of capturing project data is
engaging and more naturally suited to this process than traditional static,
linear methods such as schedules and spreadsheets.
3. INFORMATION
OVERLOAD
More often than not we are required to research or examine
and evaluate lengthy or complex pieces of information. It is that sense of
being faced with a mass of information to interpret it and make sense of it all
that can sometimes be a daunting prospect.
Mind mapping software saves us time and a whole lot of
effort in the way we can capture key words and phrases and quickly de-clutter
chunks of information. The visual aspect appeals to the way we naturally
“chunk” information to reduce complexity and gain better insights into what it
all means.
The fact that we can group, move, sort, colour-code,
categorise and/or filter on mapped information gives us various options of
working with and interpreting information quickly, effortlessly and in a less
labour-intensive way than some traditional methods.
4. THINKING SKILLS
In practically everything we do, we almost subconsciously
take our ideas and knowledge through an information journey process – capture,
understand, analyse and decide. We all embark on these information journeys
continually in most of our business activities. We don’t always process ideas,
creativity, knowledge and experience in the most effective or efficient ways,
the result of which is misunderstandings, misconceptions, missed opportunities
and missed deadlines (to name but a few!).
Too many times we miss things; we don’t utilise our
creativity as much as we should; we’re not thorough enough; we don’t have the
right tools and techniques for thinking things through.
Mind mapping software is one of the best enablers for
visualising data and facts. We can take any problem or opportunity and run it
through any technique that involves drilling into the detail of who, what,
where, why, when and how? Mapping is an excellent way of brainstorming, idea
generation and generally capturing knowledge, experience and creativity.
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