New Project Planning & Management Capabilities
In the first parts of this series leading up to the release of MindManager 2017, we’ve previewed our new Universal File Export which can be opened via any modern desktop browser, our new integrations to send content to 700+ cloud-based apps and receive updates from the same apps via Zapier.
Today, let’s explore some of the improvements to help you plan and manage projects more effectively.
Visualize your Project’s Critical Path
Critical Path modeling has been a popular method commonly used with all forms of projects including construction, aerospace and defense, software development, research projects, product development, engineering, and plant maintenance, among others.
A project’s critical path highlights the longest path of planned activities to the end of the project, and the earliest and latest that each activity can start and finish without making the project longer.
Within MindManager, there’s a new option that let’s you show the critical path within a project plan.
When you select the option to ‘Show Critical Path in Map & Gantt’, icons indicating the task is critical will appear on relevant topics and the path will be highlighted on the Gantt chart.
See the example below.
If any of the highlighted tasks slip past their due date, the project is at risk.
To help project managers focus even further on the critical tasks, we’ve added a filter to show or hide critical tasks. This feature will separate the signal from the noise, helping managers mitigate issues as they arise, ensuring projects are delivered on time!
Mitigate Issues with Task Highlights
Project management is often a daunting task…keeping track of all the moving parts and pieces of an initiative, resolving issues as they arise, keeping team members informed, removing obstacles in their way…the list goes on and on.
With this in mind, we’ve expanded our task highlighting feature to make it easier for Project Managers to identify and mitigate issues to ensure the project stays on track.
Task Highlighting options allow you to change the topic fill colors for tasks that are Late, At-Risk and tasks that have been completed.
This will make it easier for managers to scan through a list of tasks to identify potential issues or problem areas in the project.
The new settings to turn on or off the highlights are found in the Task Calendar & Display Options.
We’ve added the new option to highlight completed tasks and the ability to toggle between highlighting only roll-up tasks or all tasks in the map.
Combine both of these new capabilities — the power of color coded task highlights with the new critical path visualization — to supercharge your project management skills!
Stay tuned for our next update where we explore some exciting new ways to visualize your work with MindManager.
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When you buy or upgrade MindManager before September 30, 2016 you’ll get the current version of MindManager now, and you’ll also get MindManager 2017 for Windows when it’s released in October, courtesy of our Technology Guarantee. No hassle. No regrets. Just the best of MindManager today and tomorrow. Shop now.
We’d love to hear from you.
How are you using MindManager to support your projects? Brainstorming project ideas? Gathering and prioritizing requirements? Creating project plans and work breakdown structures?
For other MindManager 2017 related posts, click below: