Creative Project Management in 2023
Mind Map in Project Management
Do you want to do something different in Project Management? Do you think that there is no way to bring creativity in project management? Have you heard of a special technique named mind mapping?
In this blog, I want to share my thoughts on how mind map technique can help in bringing creativity in project management.
Topics:
✱ Current Project Management Downside
✱ What is Mind Map?
✱ How Mind Map can be applied to project management?
✱ When should you not use mind map?
Current Project Management Downside
The project management is mostly linear in nature. That is, when you start with a project, the milestone will be listed. Each milestone is further broken down into smaller phases and then further broken down to releases. These are listed in row format and each line item will have start and end date. These rows will have some dependencies which are captured in a separate column.
Once the plan is created in a project management tool, risk management excel sheets are created, shared among stakeholders. Then the final step is resources are identified and assigned to each activity in the plan.
The kick off meeting will mark the start of the project and then follow up cadences are set and the project starts. If there are delays, then go back change the relevant dates and see whether the project end date can be met or not. The project plan is further optimised to bring parallel task to complete multiple task in same time.
In my opinion, the downside of the current approach is that there is no visual representation of the whole project, stakeholders, milestones and teams. The structure of the project plan is more of convenience to the project manager or to the stakeholders; because of this not everybody can visualise it. The project plan over a time will have so many information, it will create confusion and less clarity on what is really happening.
The other downside is that, there will be so many excel sheets and presentations to be updated, there will be information overload and information duplication. This again creates confusion and less clarity.
What is Mind map?
Mind maps are graphical representation of information. Mind maps will help you to capture thoughts, ideas and keywords on a canvas. These maps are two dimensional in nature. The mind map starts with a core idea at the centre and then the related ideas branch off from the centre in all directions. This results in a radiant structure or a graph that can be visualised by anybody.
The mind maps can represent anything — it could represent a product feature, class notes, engineering ideas, or meeting preparation ideas, sales pitch ideas and so on, which can be visualised in a clean structure.
A mind map prepared for a launch meeting is shown below.
The above mind map created for a launch meeting is so easy to visualise. Imagine this was created in Microsoft Project planner or JIRA, how difficult it would have been to present the information.
How to Use Mind Maps in Project Management?
Let’s break the usual approach of starting a project. The first step in any project start is to create a plan or an excel or a presentation which provides a high level view about the project.
Instead of creating excel and presentation for project meetings, let’s create a Mind Map.
Here is a mind map template that I would create for a kick off meeting.
Instead of running through slides after slides, which is so boring, the entire project is visually presented, which covers all the areas of the project. This gives the edge of creativity in the project management as you are coming with an approach where everybody can visualise the big picture.
The idea is to create the branches as areas of the project and each branch further branches out into sub areas. Example Teams. There could be many teams and each team could have its own role to play. The other best part of the mind map is you can bring all the parties into one place and all of them have the same visualisation of the project. Imagine marketing team being invited for project kick off meeting and they talking about what will be done — how cool is that?
The mind map looks much better than a presentation slide deck. As a project manager, many collaboration you need to do while creating a slide deck — align the font, colour, structure, slides order and many. But creating a mind map is easier as it is almost like bullet points but visually appealing.
Once the kick off meeting completes with this visualisation, next time the project progress meeting occurs, the same mind map can be updated to indicate what has been completed using icons. This time, there is no need to change the way information is organised.
Advantages of using Mind Map
- Structured information — the details are in a structure which can be visualised. It shows the big picture at a glance and deep dives on the specifics. The mind map can also show relationships between each branches.
- Saves time — since there is a structure which can be visualised, it is easier to communicate and present the information. This will help in avoiding many follow up meetings.
- Forces Creativity — The act of developing a mind map stimulates our brain like no other technique and fosters a creative flow of ideas. Also, mind maps can be created faster than presentations.
- Improves memory and recall — Mind maps present information visually. They feature several powerful mental triggers such as images, colors, shapes and connections, which help our brain process and memorize large amounts of information.
When should you not use mind map?
Many use mind map for wrong reasons and end up making it complex which in turn resulting to fall back to slides and excel sheets. Below are few pointers, on when you should not use mind map.
- Do not use mind map for tracking the progress. For tracking the execution of project at task level, use project management tools like Microsoft planner or JIRA. Mind map should be used to bring creativity to present information visually at a higher granular level.
- Do not use mind map branches to capture every lower layer ideas. A mind map should be limited to a level where the audience understand what is discussed and then to further deep dive separate mind maps can be created. In this way, the mind maps do not become complex.
- Mind map is not a replacement for requirement document or user stories. If you want to discuss the information in the requirement document, then you can use a mind map, but do not stop writing a requirement document.
- Do not use mind map for collaborating with team members — where you ask every team member to update the mind map on their progress by creating branches of their activity. Use project management tools for getting updates. Do not make mind map as a central repository for the team members to update their progress.
Conclusion
Mind mapping technique can help you bring creativity in project management by visually representing the information and effectively communicating the information related to the project. This will help you to bring transparency with others.
You can extend mind mapping to other areas like brain storming an idea to solve a problem or to brain storm the minutes of meeting from the customer to internal stakeholders or to present a problem to a customer visually, which is easier to communicate and so on.
Let me know in the comments section, what you think about using mind map in project management and let me know if you have faced challenges while trying to use mind map in any area of your work.
In my next blog, I will be talking about the tools that are available for mind mapping and the best practices while mind mapping.
If you like this blog, please like and share. If you like to read more about such topics, please follow to get notification about the new blogs.
