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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Felicity’s Role and Needs
Felicity is a business planner in the risk-management department of a medium-sized software company. She is responsible for performing risk evaluation and business impact analyses to adequately plan for potential financial threats and other disruptive circumstances. She is continually developing and revising business continuity strategies, emergency response policies, and operational business plans to deal with these possible circumstances. Felicity must also conduct risk assessment tests, oversee 5 employees, conduct meetings to cover and deploy risk-management practices, and train company managers on procedures for handling potential disasters. She needs a tool that will help her manage communications with outside risk-assessment agencies and management teams, document and assess priorities and strategies, track data, and translate information into coherent reports for company executives.
Her Major Pain Points
- Executives do not always agree on best practices
- Team is small, making risk-assessment challenging
- Difficulty translating various pieces of data and other info into a single, accessible report
Today’s Problem
Felicity needs a way to efficiently guide the company management team and external contractors through the risk analysis process. She wants to be able to highlight differences, gain agreement on common assumptions, and then document the decisions as they are completed. This information can then serve both as a starting point for new analyses and as a reference for later discussions.
How MindManager Can Help
Felicity uses MindManager’s 2×2 analysis view to help gain consensus from the executive team on the impact of selected risks vs. their likelihood of occurring. This analysis will be used by the company to drive their risk mitigation strategy for the following year. She shares the map with the whole team using a GoToMeeting web session. She facilitates the team’s definition of the risks, and enters them into the map along with any supporting documentation, notes, or links to information stored online. Once the risks to be considered have been selected, she places them into a 2×2 analysis view that shows banded levels of risk vs. likelihood. She then guides the team towards agreement on how to position each of the risks on the two axes — risks that are judged to be both likely and high-impact receive a 1 priority, and lower-rated risks are assigned 2s and 3s. Felicity then stores a copy of the map to act as a record of the team’s decision making process, including what was considered, and the outcome of the ranking exercise. The top level priority risks are then included in Felicity’s next mitigation plan.
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