Why is mind mapping software a strong alternative to dedicated project management programs? An article published on MacMegaSite explains it more clearly than anything I have seen to date:
“What’s wrong with the age-old standard project management packages like MS Project and Merlin? Well, they certainly do give you good tools to manage your projects, but they really have a strong tendency to get people focusing on the minute task levels of projects far too early in the inception phases of a project. This means that you can easily lose sight of the main objectives of the project, or get so stuck in the details that you forget some important tasks or objectives.
But the planning for a successful project begins before that. There is a whole inception phase of the project where the relevant information is collected together and organized so that you have a clear understanding of the scope, time, cost, quality, resources, communications, risks and of course stakeholder requirements for the project.
Often this information is gathered as large specification documents which are hard to navigate around and understand the requirements, but all of these areas can benefit from the use of Mind Mapping, and you can create Mind Maps to represent each knowledge area, and have branches for the details and hyperlinks to other documents and resources where required.”
The authort points out that mind maps make it much easier for team members to clearly see what the objectives are for the project, how they are going to be achieved, the tasks that are required to achieve the outcomes, as well as the resources that are required. They can also be used to track progress and manage the project to completion.
This excellent article is adapted from a video by Gideon King from NovaMind on the same topic. If your job involves any aspect of project management, then I highly recommend this informative overview and its companion video.
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