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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Robin’s Role and Needs
Robin is a certified project manager for a small start-up in San Francisco. Although her company includes only 17 employees, she often finds herself managing more than 10 different projects at once. These include individual marketing campaigns and larger collaborative projects, like multi-faceted campaigns and the creation of content assets. She is the only person in her company with a certification in project management. Her title is General Project Manager, and as a result, she is consulted on a variety of initiatives by everyone in her organization. She needs a project and task-management tool that will help her streamline and track tasks, schedules, budgets, and communications across teams.
Her Major Pain Points
- No formal teams are assigned to complete projects; work must be fit into each group’s functional responsibilities
- Robin has been trained as a traditional project manager, but the rest of the organization is not familiar with a PM’s typical roles and responsibilities
- Vague but highly important expectations from all employees
- No department-specific training in the PM role
Today’s Problem
If you recall from our previous posts this week (see 1, 2, and 3), Robin is working on an upcoming release for her company. After her project plan has been more or less finalized, Robin needs a way to track the progress of the release project as it is being executed. She would like to both work within the map and integrate with a task-management system of her choosing.
How MindManager Can Help
Robin has several options when it comes to tracking the detailed work required for the execution of each task. She can update information in her map, export to Microsoft Project, or use a shared Mindjet ProjectDirector account.
With Mindjet ProjectDirector, Robin can assign key people as followers of each task. She can then set up a notification schedule in Tasks, so that each of the people assigned to a task receive notifications of task changes and updates via email. As a public, cloud-based product, ProjectDirector allows Robin to easily add and assign tasks to people both inside and outside of her company. Project team members have the ability to see and add information to their own tasks, as well as view the map that contains the original project requirements and overall schedule. The tasks are linked back to the map itself — as they are completed, or as their end dates are extended, Robin can use the project map as a task dashboard. This allows her to immediately drill down into tasks that are having problems and work to fix them. She can also give quick overviews of the project status to the team and any other key management or customer stakeholders.
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Want to check out the benefits of Mindjet MindManager yourself? Upgrade now for $129 or buy a new seat for $349.