Mapping & Publishing Management Meetings with MindManager

Last Friday and Saturday I worked with an associate who was facilitating a management team to produce in internal business development plan for 2008-09. My role was to map and publish the presentations, exercises and discussions. The team of ten was seated at a conference table and I had my production office on a table at the back of the room. I had brought an A3 Canon iX5000 printer, a TC4400 Tablet PC, an extension monitor and MindManager 7 Pro. You can work twice as fast with an extension monitor.

The first map produced was the "Intentions of the Meeting" and the last process was the conversion of the four theme task maps in to one Gantt Chart using JCVGantt with task owners and dates. At the end of each session I printed out a map and posted it on the wall for review and adding comments. During the weekend the maps, plans, photographs, PowerPoint files and Word documents supplied by the attendees were built in to a web site map in MindManager.

I cannot give you details of the content of the weekend but the statistics are:

• 28 maps produced

• A project plan with 57 tasks as a Gantt chart printed on A3, a MS Project Plan and an Excel spreadsheet

• 15 photographs

• Assembled in to a 38 page 15mb web site which displays the maps as images and has links to the 28 maps and 22 other documents.

This web site is now on the companies internal web server and will be used to communicate the content of the meeting to the 350 employees.

Not sure I could have done this without MindManager.

What did I learn during the weekend:

• I need to experiment and practice using JCVGantt. Some of my expectations were not met because I did not understand how the "engine" worked with start date, due date and duration. All the task were floating and perhaps I need a start and finish milestone.

• Polish and save the two different map styles I created during the weekend, one for the primarily portrait display on the web pages and a landscape style for printing on A3.

• That you can do this. The facilitator "I know you have been talking about this for a while Andrew. Now I can see the value and promote it to my clients" and the client "I have never had the output of this sort of meeting in a publishable form the day after" were very pleased with the result.
  

We are quoting for a further three days for the next level down in the organisation.