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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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 and Wednesday’s posts, our product manager Andy is working on some upcoming product launches for his company. Andy runs a daily stand-up meeting with product team members to make sure that production is proceeding smoothly. He uses input from these stand-ups, as well as his other resources, to provide weekly status reports to upper management. These reports show how top-level goals are being met. They also demonstrate when and where any problems have been identified, and how they’re being dealt with effectively.
How MindManager Can Help
Andy’s daily stand-ups are on the shop floor, so it’s more convenient to bring his tablet with him than anything else. Andy can use the Mindjet mobile mapping app to add the latest information to his product status map; this includes photos he takes from his mobile device to illustrate part defects. Back at his desk, Andy can access the latest copy of his map from his desktop, provide additional annotations, and then send out a viewable PDF via email as a status report on the product. The PDF gives his team members — even the ones who are not familiar with MindManager — a quick and easy-to-understand overview of the product status. Andy uses “red flag” icons to visually indicate problem areas. He can also attach notes to the map to detail how each problem is being dealt with, or indicate if he needs any assistance from other people in the company.
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