Have you found yourself suddenly saddled with management duties? When you are a manager, not only are you responsible for your own tasks, but you are also on the line for the tasks of those you manage. Like everything else, management is a skill that has to be learned.
This can be an overwhelming task, especially when you are trying to balance your work and personal life or even several projects. You need to keep getting things done and move your projects forward. Fortunately for you, there are four simple techniques that you can easily implement to make you a better manager immediately and save you time:
- Organize your ideas using a mind map
- Optimize your operations using process maps (flowcharts)
- Organize your team organization charts and team charts
- Manage your work with a project chart
In a series of posts, I will be guiding you through some of the techniques I use at SmartDraw. Starting out, in this post I will show you how you can use a simple but powerful visual tool to get organized - the mind map.
The key to being a better manager is getting things organized - ideas, people, and projects - in order to get work done on time and, hopefully, under budget. I strongly believe there is no better way to get organized than with a mind map.
Why Use a Mind Map
A mind map is a visual outline with the central box as the top-level idea, topics as bullets below it, subtopics as elements of each bullet, and so on. I find that using a mind map is a very efficient way to record ideas during a brainstorming session. After the brainstorming session, it is easy for me to see all of my ideas and tasks. After that, all I have to do is organize them into a coherent plan.
Why use a mind map instead of an outline? Mind maps are better than outlines because:
- They are easier to read than bulleted lists
- They are better for brainstorming
- They are much more interesting than bullets when presenting your ideas in a PowerPoint® presentation
- They are much more spatially efficient since you can branch out your ideas horizontally (lists grow mostly vertically)
- Mind maps let you see what you're thinking, while bulleted lists don't convey ideas with the same level of clarity as a mind map
How to Create a Mind Map
Let's use the launch of a new product as an example:
Step 1. Start with a Few Initial "Big Topics."
This product is going to be handled by a reseller channel. The big topics are:
- Recruiting the resellers
- Training them
- Creating sales collaterals they can use
- Generating customer leads for them
- Using PR to increase awareness about the product
Step 2. Refine Each "Big Topic" with a Few Specific "Areas of Interest."
We took the original list and expanded on each node with a few increasingly specified subtopics; here's how our mind map appears in outline format:
- Go to Market Plan
- PR
- Press Releases
- Hire Agency
- Press Tour
- Lead Generation
- Product Collaterals
- Data sheet
- Web Site
- E-mails
- Print Ads
- Sales Training
- Recruit Resellers
- E-mail to list
- Call leads
See how we have much more space to get information across when we use a mind map? Now we're going to take it one step further.
Step 3. Refine, Add More Subtopics, Then Repeat.
You can keep iterating through subtopics until you have covered the full set of possible topics. A bulleted list with this much content would become less and less legible, but a mind map remains manageable.
Software built for mind maps allows you to flexibility mature your thinking about your project and project details. With SmartDraw you can easily move around the different parts of the mind map as your thinking matures. Here is a short video showing how to create a mind map using SmartDraw:
If you would like to take a look at the mind map I used in this article, you can use the link below to download it. You will need a version of SmartDraw on your computer to view the file. If you do not already have SmartDraw on your desktop, you can download a free trial of SmartDraw. Let me know what you think and how you use mind maps in the comments below!
[Example] Components of the Go To Market Plan.sdr
