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!
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Anna’s Role and Needs
Anna is the event coordinator for a large textbook publishing company. She is responsible for organizing and scheduling meetings and events for authors, executives, and six different departments within her company. She is responsible for communicating with vendors, managing travel itineraries for authors and executives, tracking high-priority contracts, planning company events and participation at conferences, financial planning for events, and the purchase or rental of things like chairs, booths, shelves, electronic equipment, and any other items that are required for a given event. Anna is also responsible for organizing the minute-to-minute processes of the events, including catering, product delivery and setup, badge obtainment for employees attending conferences, accommodations, banner and table setup, and overall, ensuring that everyone and everything is where it should be, when it should be. She needs a tool that can help her manage, track, and execute her various responsibilities, create several schedules, track communications and budgets, and organize the many aspects of each event in one easily-accessible place.
Her Major Pain Points
- No team; must ask for help from random people whenever available
- Reports to VP’s Executive Assistant although he is not her official manager, which means she is largely on her own in terms of getting information about her responsibilities
- No allotted budget; she must first research costs and submit proposals, which are often rejected without detailed explanations or suggestions
Today’s Problem
If you recall from yesterday’s post, the Biology team at Anna’s company has a conference coming up in two weeks. As the Event Coordinator, Anna has no direct authority over any of the participants, but she must make sure that each group is satisfied that their own goals for the event have been met. She must also be sure to deliver all of the required stages of any particular part of the event on time and within her budget. She has to deal with continuous, last-minute changes from participants inside the company, as well as outside consultants and vendors she is working with.
How MindManager Can Help
As Anna receives email requests from a variety of different stakeholders, she is able to drag and drop copies of the emails into the appropriate part of the map. She can also drag in contact information for key people as well — that way, she is able to easily email or call people as she is dealing with day-to-day conflicts and scheduling changes that occur with the event and participants. If she needs to create plans and assign tasks to individuals both inside and outside her company, she can put together a high-level plan in MindManager, and then send the planned topics as tasks to ProjectDirector. By using ProjectDirector, she has a much more fluid and social way to drive each task to completion. She can also add key people as followers to each of the tasks assigned, so that they get regular, automatic updates on each of the tasks.
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Want to learn more? Join us for our webinar, "What's New in MindManager 14 for Windows?" taking place this Thursday 9/19 at 10AM. Register here.