Part 2 of 8 in the blog series, ‘What’s Great in MindManager 8’!
Mapping with MindManager offers a great way to visualize projects. MindManager has helped plan and organize millions of projects easily capturing tasks & requirements as well as creating project dashboards to communicate the big picture and highlight project details. Now, MindManager 8 offers some great enhancements that make your project reporting more accurate, easier to maintain and provides the information that you need to know to better manage exceptions to keep your project on track. Take a look:
1. Roll-up Tasks
When you mark a task as a ‘Roll-up’ task, MindManager reviews all the topics in its branch and calculates the start date, finish date and duration. There’s a new icon, the clock with the red check mark, to indicate that this is a roll-up task. If you use your mouse to hover over the % complete icon in the summary task, you’ll see the exact calculated % complete.
2. Faster Creation of Dependencies
Creating project dependencies in MindManager 7 and earlier required you to draw a relationship between each two topics. That’s a lot of clicks if you have a decent sized plan. With MindManager 8, it’s now a breeze. Simply click and drag a rectangle to select two or more topics within a branch that has a Roll-up task. Then, select the dependency type from the dependency pull down list in the Task Info pane. The order the tasks are selected dictates the direction of the dependencies.
3. New Dependency Types
As you may have noticed in the earlier task image, there are new symbols that appear in task relationship lines. These represent the extended dependency types available.
4. Highlighted Issues
After you ‘plan your work’ and start ‘working your plan’, summary tasks kick in and automatically recalculate when you update tasks. The task pane lets you set fill colors to highlight when tasks and summary tasks are overdue or at risk of being late. This lets you focus your attention on the tasks that matter most!
In the example above, the summary task was automatically updated to be ‘at-risk’ because an individual task was highlighted as ‘late’. So, now you can review the project at a high level, and drill down in the areas that need your attention.
5. New Map Calendar
You can also adjust your work calendar, indicating both workdays and holidays, to keep project schedules accurate.
Check out Part 1 of this series:
If you missed the first post in this series on the Mindjet Player, click here.
Add feedback to the comments below. How will you use the new task management features?