Access and Control Your Project from One Page

Note for PMPs: This course is approved by the world’s leading professional association for project management, the Project Management Institute, earning you 10 PDUs towards re-certification. (Course code MM4P)

What is MindManager® for Projects?

MindManager® for Projects applies the fundamental concepts, tools, and techniques of project management via the Project Dashboard. The Project Dashboard, like the dashboard in your car, contains and displays all relevant information including document files (MS Word®; PowerPoint®; Excel® and more) as well as communication and risk management plans linked directly to planning and scheduling software such as JVC Gantt® and MS Project®. The Project Dashboard is a powerfully dynamic, yet flexible, visual communication tool. It’s the easiest and most efficient way to learn and perform project management — no matter the project size.

Everything you learn in MindManager® for Projects is contained in the Project Dashboard you create during the course. After going through MindManager® for Projects, you’ll know the Project Dashboard you’ve built inside out; customizing is a snap. What’s more, that same Project Dashboard then becomes your next real-life project template. What could be easier or more practical?

What is a Project Dashboard?

It’s a visual representation of your entire project on one single page.

What’s In It for me?

For professional project managers,you’ll earn valuable PDUs from PMI and come away with a new tool in your project management toolkit. The Project Dashboard will save you valuable time and effort, especially if you’re managing simultaneous projects or projects with multiple locations.
For those new to project management,you’ll learn to manage projects of any size based on global standards. The Project Dashboard is especially useful if you perform projects infrequently since all you have to do is fill in your template. What’s more, the skills you learn, such as goal setting, planning, scheduling, and risk management can be applied to many business settings besides project management.

How Can I Use the Project Dashboard?

Capturing Requirements

• Use the Project Dashboard in MindManager® for Projects to facilitate requirement gathering
• Learn to simplify and accelerate the process of recording complex business requirements in a collaborative atmosphere
• Collaborate with stakeholders to capture, prioritize and document project requirements
• Add or attach all initial requirement draft data for later review, including e-mail
• Communicate requirements to your team and stakeholders right from the Project Dashboard

Accelerate Planning

• Accelerate project planning with MindManager® for Projects. See the big picture along with the details on one page with the Project Dashboard.
• Integrate your Project Dashboard with Microsoft Project® and other project management tools you currently use

Use the Project Dashboard to:

• Simplify the project planning process
• Use MindManager® to brainstorm, prioritize and assign tasks
• Brainstorm, prioritize and assign tasks
• Highlight key project information along with your schedules like budget status and high priority risks

Communication

Clear and consistent communication significantly lowers project risk.

Use the Project Dashboard to:

• Identify, profile, and track key project stakeholders
• Document communication requirements
• Set up and automate your communication plan
• Communicate progress and potential roadblocks
• Set expectations and align team members
• Export reports directly from the Project Dashboard
• Set alerts to remind you when to send reports

Meetings

Keep teams collaborating, informed, and focused:

• Create dynamic, results-oriented meetings that promote participation and collaboration
• Project the Project Dashboard on a screen, quickly providing a high-level snapshot—and details—of your progress
• Review progress, adding data and assigning task ownership immediately to the Project Dashboard, ensuring complete understanding of who does what and when
• Keep teams harmonized by reinforcing project objectives and scope

Managing Risk

Identify, prioritize, mitigate, and assign risks to improve how you manage and mitigate threats to your projects and organization.

Use the Project Dashboard to facilitate the way you:

• Identify risks within your project or organization
• Develop effective risk-response strategies
• Assign responsibility for monitoring risks
• Set alerts to ensure things get done

The Whole Project on One Page

The key advantage of the Project Dashboard is having everything and anything related to your project organized and accessible on one page.
At your fingertips will be:

• All documentation: just click and open in MindManager®
• Project team and stakeholder contact info: you can send an e-mail without leaving the Project Dashboard
• All requirements. You can even add attachments and notes from previous requirement-gathering sessions to ensure stakeholder needs are captured and recorded
• The WBS providing detailed project scope including schedule, resources assignment and project costs
• The WBS, which can be dynamically linked to a traditional Gantt chart
• Communication, quality and risk management plans complete with alerts
• All your meetings minutes, which can be recorded in the Project Dashboard. You can either add them directly or attach them.
• The entire project map – which can be saved as an archive to capture the entire project for future use. Additionally, back up is a breeze.
• For those without MindManager®, you can save and send the Project Dashboard as an interactive Project Dashboard file.
• Best of all, you can use the same Project Dashboard for recording and presenting the project to team members, customers, management—to any and all stakeholders.
• The Project Dashboard can also be used to bring new project team members up to speed quickly, even when the new member is project manager.

Clarity, Communication and Collaboration

Having the breadth of a project’s information accessible from one page means there’s a single repository for your entire project, thus providing you and your team with an clear overview of the status on all deliverables, action items, issues, risks, and for however else you customized your Project Dashboard. The Project Dashboard helps individuals and teams perform better by improving communication and collaboration.

Applicable to Any Project in Any Industry

MindManager® for Projects and the Project Dashboard working in tandem is the simplest and most efficient way to learn and perform project management. Together, they are applicable to any project in any industry.

If you manage projects or just want to learn how to use MindManager® for your business, MindManager® for Projects will change positively the way you and your team work.

How It Started

Ten years ago, I ran projects for Japanese medical laboratories seeking accreditation from the College of American Pathologists (CAP). CAP projects took a year to complete, involving everyone in the lab — from director to technicians and even cleaning staff! Project teams numbered from 400 to over 1500 members and our checklist included over 3,000 items, with each requiring proof of compliance.

More than once, communication involving language and cultural differences compounded issues. We would meet every two weeks to review progress and confirm understanding of next steps. It was a long and difficult process for everyone involved, particularly for staff that worked overtime with minimal compensation. Needless to say, motivation wasn’t high. For me, the most difficult aspect was controlling documentation since there was something for almost every item on the checklist. Tracking progress and communicating with team members and management was also time consuming. When I visited the labs, I spent at least six hours a visit meeting with the full team as well as smaller specialty teams involved in areas like microbiology and anatomic pathology. Another two hours was spent performing mock lab inspections. To top this off, I usually had to two or three separate CAP projects at one time usually located 2-4 hours from each other. In other words, I was desperate for some project management assistance. After some research, I came across Gantt charts and began using MS Project®.

Projects Require More than Gantt Charts

In the beginning, Gantt chart software helped me a lot and I continue using these charts today since they’re perfect for schedule and resource management. What they’re not made to do, however, is handle document filing, communication, risk management, reporting, or the myriad other tasks involved in project management. I still needed something more.

From Mind Mapping to MindManager®

I’ve been Mind Mapping since the early 90s and was certified as an instructor by Tony Buzan. I began using Mind Maps at meetings and learned that, although hand-drawn maps were great for communicating, they could grow unwieldy when the number of maps increased. As a result I started experimenting with a mapping software called MindManager® which I felt had project-level potential and, over time, I developed what became the Project Dashboard. Primitive at first, the Dashboard has since developed into a highly efficient and useful project management tool that accelerates almost every aspect of project management. It totally changed my approach to project management and I’m confident it can improve yours, too.

The Project Dashboard: DIY?

You may be asking yourself: “Can’t I just make my own Project Dashboard?” Yes, you can. That’s what I did and I’m not the only one. In fact, many project managers indeed use something very similar to my Project Dashboard. At the same time, doing it yourself can be a time-consuming trial-and-error process and I’m hoping that you can gain an important shortcut by benefiting from my 10-plus years of project management experience, my 9 years of using MindManager®, and my 12 years of developing and delivering training courses. To save you time, I’ve condensed all that experience into 20 training videos that explain the process from the ground up. For you, this means that with only a few hours of online training, you too can build and customize a professional-level Project Dashboard ready to use immediately.

The Project Dashboard and the Global Standard

The Project Dashboard is a natural progression for anyone using MindManager® for project management. At the same time, your business demands the best and latest which is why Project Dashboard is a Project Management Institute (PMI) approved course that’s based on and applies the global project management standard, PMBOK (Project Management Book of Knowledge).

With over 500,000 subscribers worldwide to PMI’s PMBOK, this means that the fundamentals you learn in MindManager® for Projects are the same ones used globally. For projects involving global teams, your Project Dashboard can be shown during live or online meetings or teleconferences—thus providing a visual reference for the entire project from big picture to tiniest detail. When distance, language, and culture influence your project, the Project Dashboard boosts understanding and communication.

Access to everything on one page provides you and your team with an overview of the status of all deliverables, action items, issues, risks, and anything else you customized your Project Dashboard to manage.

Sign Up Today

If you manage projects or just want to learn how to use MindManager® for your business, click Sign Up Today for MindManager® for Projects now and change the way you and your team work.

MS Word®; PowerPoint®; Excel® and MS Project® are registered trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation. MindManager® and JVC Gantt® are the registered trademarks of the Mindjet Inc.