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!
*****
Andy’s Role and Needs
Andy is the Senior Product Manager for a multi-national company that manufactures waterproof cables utilized by deep sea divers and submarine operators, including those in the military. He heads a team of 12 people and reports to 3 high-level executives. Two of those executives are based in Europe and one is based in Australia, but Andy lives in the United States. His job is to oversee manufacturing and delivery operations that begin in the EMEA and APAC regions, but that end in the Americas. He has to find ways to limit expenditures, adopt technologies or practices to improve delivery quantities and schedules, and maintain an appropriate communications hierarchy in his team. He needs a tool to help him manage these large-scale duties while still being able to accurately track data and create robust presentations.
His Major Pain Points
- Difficulties conducting meetings with disparate teams
- Team is so large and spread out that managing communications between team and executives is challenging
- No singular way of tracking large amounts of data from the top down, which often leads to lost information
Today’s Problem
If you recall from Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday’s posts, our product manager Andy is working on some upcoming product launches for his company. If problems occur, Andy needs a way to quickly gather a “tiger team” to brainstorm creative solutions to the problem, and put together a recovery plan that gets the process back on track quickly and effectively.
How MindManager Can Help
When a serious problem occurs, Andy can use MindManager to help him quickly pull together a set of key individuals from inside and outside of the company to troubleshoot the problem, identify its root cause, and then put together an action plan on how to solve it — as well as put process changes in place to keep it from re-occurring. Andy uses a “fishbone” analysis template from MindManager to begin collecting all of the factors that may have potentially caused the problem. He can also include a brainstorming session to insure that the team is looking at all of the root causes, and not just the standard “go-to” issues that occur in day-to-day production. Andy can use MindManager’s Guided Brainstorming feature to help facilitate a risk analysis brainstorming session. This has the added benefit of creating a permanent record of the ideas that were created and evaluated during the brainstorming session, including ones that, although tabled for this particular analysis, might be relevant in the future.
(click for full-size image)
Want to check out the benefits of Mindjet MindManager yourself? Upgrade now for $129 or buy a new seat for $349.