Throughout this blog series, I have stressed the importance
of communication. If you think back to your best managers, probably the
overarching similarity is their ability to clearly communicate project goals,
requirements, progress, and feedback. If you take the time to look through many
of the materials on the SmartDraw website, you will see the theme of improve
your communication with visuals, shorten your meeting times, and increase the
understanding through the use of visuals. These facts couldn’t be more true. How
often have you sat through a meeting, taken a couple notes, and then gotten
back to your desk having no idea what was said and what to do?
This is why it is important to share the visuals made on
your own and presented during meetings with your team. As a manager, it is your
job to ensure everyone is on the same page and avoid the following situation:
In order to both stay on track and cut down those long project review meetings, it helps to make sure the project objectives,
timeline, and details are in an accessible place. Next time you have a project
meeting, try just using your mind map to communicate the project goals. This
way, as you get feedback from the team, you can easily edit any of the goals
and you can stay on track with any goals previously discussed. This same mind
map and any project or Gantt charts can then be shared with your team members.
Over the past year, I have increasingly been using Microsoft SharePoint with my
teams in order to better communicate and stay on track with project goals. It
is a great tool to share team progress and documents in a place where everyone
can access the information. Lucky for us, SmartDraw has a great integration
with SharePoint which makes it easy to publish visuals to the site.
If you don’t have SharePoint, it is still important to share
the visuals you create and those that you edit during your meetings. How have
you stayed on track with your projects in the past? Try using and sharing your
mind map for your current or upcoming projects, and let me know how it goes.
If you missed the previous posts in this series, be sure to
go back and take a look at some of my own methods:
Being a Visual Manager: The First Steps
Being a Visual Manager: Implementing a Project
Plan
Being a Visual Manager: Tracking Your Workflows
