Decomposing Broad Tasks Using Mind Maps
Many projects are delivered late—one of the key reasons being that
the tasks assigned to team members are too broad or vague. A good example of
a broad task is "design a new email campaign to sell a new product offering
to existing customers." So, how long would it take your team to complete this task?
Two days? Three days? Two weeks? You don't know whether to test different emails,
offers, artwork, landing pages or groups of customers to determine which
combinations work best for each group. And that's where the trouble begins
with most projects: no specifics.
Most projects are late largely because of these broad tasks, and the
estimated timeline from inception to delivery is typically unrealistic and short.
Thus, the solution is to decompose these broad tasks into a number of smaller subtasks.
It's easier to determine how long it will take you or your team to accomplish a smaller
task as opposed to a larger one.
Don't believe me? Let's try an experiment that everyone can relate to:
moving from one home to another. Consider these two groups of questions:
- How long will it take you to develop and execute a new email marketing campaign to existing customers offering a new product in your company's line?
- How long will it take you to do the following:
- Have your copywriter produce original copy for a single offer email?
- Have your graphic designer develop a sleek layout for a single email?
- Have your technical writer proofread a single email?
- Have your web development team format a single email into HTML?
You get the idea: it's almost impossible to give an accurate answer to
the first group of questions, whereas it's much more feasible to provide some reasonable
answers for the second set. You can use the sum of all of the times required for each small
task to determine how long it will take you and your team to accomplish a much larger task.
And that's what we're going to show you in our video today—how to use mind maps in
SmartDraw 2009 to take a project and break down its tasks into much more specific tasks.
In subsequent lessons, you will see how these smaller, specific tasks help you to create more
realistic, accurate project schedules and deliver your projects on time and on budget.
How to do it with SmartDraw
The project used as an example in the video is an email marketing campaign to sell a new
product offering to existing customers.
Here's a summary of the steps that are covered:
Step 1
Select the "mind maps" option from the SmartTemplate menu on the left and then click on the "Blank Mind Map" SmartTemplate.
Step 2
Add specific tasks to the mind map by clicking the "add topic" buttons in the SmartPanel.
Step 3
Think of all the tasks that that have to get done for each major component of your project and add them as sub topics by clicking "Add Topic" in the SmartPanel.
Step 4
For subtasks that appear under other elements of the project, you can copy and paste each child node and drag and drop them into place under other topic boxes.
Once all of the tasks on the mind map are specific enough, you can begin to assign accurate durations to each of them.