Team exercise job content
Discussion Open
Next week we are organizing a team event and we want every individual to define prior to the event all his/her tasks on a card, give it a score and put it on a board.
During the live session we will re-organize the job packages troughout the team by moving the cards under their name and defining the scope for new hires.
We want to organize this using our 1 mindmanager license, since this is the only time all teammembers will be using the platform.
What is the best practice here?
Without knowing parameters such as the number of people, the organisation type, the level of detail involved or the technologies available, it's difficult to say, but here are some suggestions.
Basically the exercise has two parts - information gathering, and the actual planning session itself. The second part is by far the easiest, as it's basically the sort of thing that MindManager was designed for and can be done with a single licence. I'll come back to this later.
The first part is more complex. Again, it's hard to respond without knowing how much detail you is involved when you say "define prior to the event all his/her tasks on a card, give it a score and put it on a board." Are we talking a sentence here, or a list or table? What is the score meant to represent and how will it be expressed? Can the task descriptions be standardised, or will each individual be able to write them his/her own way? And what sort of board are you talking about?
The other issue is actually getting the material from different people into the map, especially when you have only one MM licence (and presumably only a small number of people with the ability to use it). You could set up a simple Word template which people could use to record this information, which is then sent to the MM expert (presumably you) to transfer to the map. You probably want the tasks to appear in the map as sub-topics under the person's name, in which case the template should use a Word Heading 1 style for the person's name, and Heading 2 styles for both the score and the tasks.
Once this material has been received you will have to get it into the map. This was simpler to do in the days of when a Send to MindManager option could be installed on the Word ribbon, but with MM21 this is no longer available. One alternative is to collate the response into a single Word document which you could then import into a MM map. You could either arrange this to broadly represent the organisation structure (in which case you might want to use Heading 2 and 3 styles in the Word template and use Heading 1 styles in the final document to represent the organisation's departments/sections), or turn the responses into a set of floating topics.
Once the material has been added then you can start the planning session. You can move each individual's topic and task subtopics around the map, and move task subtropics between people, as well as adding to, modifying or deleting these tasks. If you are interested in hiring additional people you could use this process to create new positions, and move tasks to these new topics. You can also adjust the score for each person. If you want to get really fancy you could turn this into a topic property and there are all sorts of things you can do tags, formulas and SmartRules, but don't overcomplicate it!
There is a lot of material available on how to run planning sessions with MindManager, including resources on the MindManager website, and example maps on Biggerplate: https://www.biggerplate.com/ I've also written a series of articles on this which is available on the Mindmapping Software Blog: https://mindmappingsoftwareblog.com/strategic-planning-whiteboard-mind-map/
Without knowing parameters such as the number of people, the organisation type, the level of detail involved or the technologies available, it's difficult to say, but here are some suggestions.
Basically the exercise has two parts - information gathering, and the actual planning session itself. The second part is by far the easiest, as it's basically the sort of thing that MindManager was designed for and can be done with a single licence. I'll come back to this later.
The first part is more complex. Again, it's hard to respond without knowing how much detail you is involved when you say "define prior to the event all his/her tasks on a card, give it a score and put it on a board." Are we talking a sentence here, or a list or table? What is the score meant to represent and how will it be expressed? Can the task descriptions be standardised, or will each individual be able to write them his/her own way? And what sort of board are you talking about?
The other issue is actually getting the material from different people into the map, especially when you have only one MM licence (and presumably only a small number of people with the ability to use it). You could set up a simple Word template which people could use to record this information, which is then sent to the MM expert (presumably you) to transfer to the map. You probably want the tasks to appear in the map as sub-topics under the person's name, in which case the template should use a Word Heading 1 style for the person's name, and Heading 2 styles for both the score and the tasks.
Once this material has been received you will have to get it into the map. This was simpler to do in the days of when a Send to MindManager option could be installed on the Word ribbon, but with MM21 this is no longer available. One alternative is to collate the response into a single Word document which you could then import into a MM map. You could either arrange this to broadly represent the organisation structure (in which case you might want to use Heading 2 and 3 styles in the Word template and use Heading 1 styles in the final document to represent the organisation's departments/sections), or turn the responses into a set of floating topics.
Once the material has been added then you can start the planning session. You can move each individual's topic and task subtopics around the map, and move task subtropics between people, as well as adding to, modifying or deleting these tasks. If you are interested in hiring additional people you could use this process to create new positions, and move tasks to these new topics. You can also adjust the score for each person. If you want to get really fancy you could turn this into a topic property and there are all sorts of things you can do tags, formulas and SmartRules, but don't overcomplicate it!
There is a lot of material available on how to run planning sessions with MindManager, including resources on the MindManager website, and example maps on Biggerplate: https://www.biggerplate.com/ I've also written a series of articles on this which is available on the Mindmapping Software Blog: https://mindmappingsoftwareblog.com/strategic-planning-whiteboard-mind-map/
Hi Danny,
using a board is still an useful way to do this. I prefer brainstormin ideas and everyone is writing them on a card bei himself.
Then transfer all collected ideas directls to MindManager - using the free-form- or the flowchart-template.
Switch to Icon-view and move your cards from the left into the right proirity columns.
Don't forget to make the map visible to everyone
Collecting ideas on a board can look godd, impresive and and give the impression that a lot of work has been done.
But what's the next step? What happens to all the cards? Taking a picture and send it to the team members is mostly the only thing that's done.
With MindManager you transfer your ranked ideas into tasks immediatly. I'm very succesful doing work shops supported with MindManager in that way.
Have a try and good luck.
Regards, Andreas
Hi Danny,
using a board is still an useful way to do this. I prefer brainstormin ideas and everyone is writing them on a card bei himself.
Then transfer all collected ideas directls to MindManager - using the free-form- or the flowchart-template.
Switch to Icon-view and move your cards from the left into the right proirity columns.
Don't forget to make the map visible to everyone
Collecting ideas on a board can look godd, impresive and and give the impression that a lot of work has been done.
But what's the next step? What happens to all the cards? Taking a picture and send it to the team members is mostly the only thing that's done.
With MindManager you transfer your ranked ideas into tasks immediatly. I'm very succesful doing work shops supported with MindManager in that way.
Have a try and good luck.
Regards, Andreas
Agree with Andreas.
And you could consider Co-editing for the participants to enter their ideas.
Co-edit is a subscription addin, but you can have a 30 day trial period.
Agree with Andreas.
And you could consider Co-editing for the participants to enter their ideas.
Co-edit is a subscription addin, but you can have a 30 day trial period.
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