NovaMind News

“Power Brainstorming: Great Ideas at Lightning Speed” by brainstorming expert Hazel Wagner draws on her wide range of experience as a mathematician, business owner, public speaker and consultant to Fortune 100 companies, to produce a book that covers everything required to conduct individual and group brainstorming sessions.

The book is aimed at anyone who owns, runs, or works in any business. It provides practical tips and examples that can be applied in any business to cut costs and open up new business opportunities. Existing products and services can be improved, processes streamlined, and new product lines and services added as a result of the brainstorming processes taught in this book.

Processes are taught in the book to super-charge the innovation of the company and instill a culture of effective brainstorming throughout the company.

In the current business environment it is critical to differentiate a company to stay ahead of the competition. The techniques taught in this book are specifically designed to provide the tools necessary to achieve and maintain that differentiation.

Illustrations are provided throughout the book to show how to implement the concepts, including a number of NovaMind mind maps. There are two parallel tracks in the book: Track 1 is filled with instructions and methods to make brainstorming sessions productive and fun, and gives so many choices that your brainstorming efforts will never get boring. Track 2 tells the story of a group of employees that begin brainstorming with a young novice facilitator. This team’s efforts start to catch the attention of the firm’s executives who want to learn how and why the methods have been so effective.

This combination of presentations makes for a book that is both thorough in its coverage of the topic and easy to implement in a practical way in the workplace.

The book is available as an eBook from http://www.novamind.com/mind-mapping-books/power-brainstorming.php

Gideon King, founder of NovaMind said “I was privileged to be involved in the development of the book, and am impressed with the thoroughness of the book and the practical advice that is provided. This is the kind of book that could be picked up by anyone and used to learn all you need to know about brainstorming quickly and effectively. The NovaMind Mind Maps included in the book are a great example of the power of Mind Mapping when used in conjunction with brainstorming.”

About Mind Mapping

Mind Maps are diagrams that work the way people think — they organize the information in the same way our brains organize information. They make it easy to understand, remember, and communicate complex information.

Our brains like thinking in pictures. The smooth curves and colorful pictures used in Mind Mapping create powerful images for your brain to remember.

Mind Maps cater to both logical left brain thinking and pictorial right brain thinking at the same time, which makes them a very good way of storing and recalling information, presenting things to other people, and brainstorming new ideas.

About NovaMind

NovaMind is used by businesses, in education, and for personal effectiveness, for tasks such as note taking, managing to-do lists, brainstorming, research, problem solving, decision making, presentation preparation and delivery, project planning, knowledge management, writing, and many other uses. NovaMind has been the top Mind Mapping program available on Mac computers for the last 7 years, and has been available for Windows for over 3 years. It is rapidly gaining recognition for its many unique and innovative features and ease of use. NovaMind makes Mind Mapping intuitive and fun.

For more information about NovaMind, please visit www.novamind.com or e-mail Gideon King at gideon(at)novamind.com.

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By anybody’s definition, Dr Joanna Martin would have to be defined as amazing.

In her first year teaching and selling from the stage, she made $1.25 million, and became an internationally recognized speaker in UK, USA and Australia. In just under three years, she sold over $3.8 million worth of products, and consulted with businesses, making over $47 million in the process…all before her 30th birthday!

She has recently started using NovaMind, and now uses it every day for preparing her presentations. Here is what she has to say about it:

“Just wanted to let you know I bought your mindmap software the other day and am head over heels in love with it!

I am using it daily to plan content for teleseminars and trainings. And in the past where I wouldn’t even consider planning a workshop without postit notes, and a lot of wall space to stick them on (!), I can now happily plan with all my usual creativity, but on my baby laptop in the cafe, at 38,000ft, or in the office.

I love how it’s so easy to rearrange your thoughts once you’ve brain-dumped it all out!

Love it love it love it. I only wish I had got onto using NovaMind sooner. It’s awesome and I think every teacher, speaker and educator should use it.”

Dr Joanna Martin
Public speaking trainer
Director, Shift Enterprises
www.SecretsOfSellingFromStage.com

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Juan Gómez-Jurado uses NovaMind Mind Mapping software to write his books…and apparently it is working out rather well for him, seeing as he has sold over a million copies of his book “God’s Spy”, and has also received over half a million dollars for his last book.

He says that NovaMind is essential for his writing process, and is very much looking forward to NovaMind 5, which will be released in September/October. In his own words:

“For mind mapping my last novel, I used Novamind 4, and I want to thank you. Novamind 4 was amazing, esential throughout the whole process.

I’m starting to mindmap my next novel, and would love to do it on Novamind 5.

I’m gonna buy the update asap…Your software is so good that I received 500K$ for my last novel. That says it all!!

And I’m really eager of grabbing Novamind 5.”

Juan Gómez-Jurado
International best-selling author
(Including “God’s Spy”, which has sold over 1 million books)
www.juangomezjurado.com

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Mind Maps are a great tool for planning and managing projects.

In this video I will show you how to plan your projects and how to use those project plans for scope management,  communicating project goals, and getting the buy-in of all stakeholders.

The earlier video on to do lists introduced you to the basic concepts of organizing your requirements using mind mapping. Now we will extend that to look at project planning specifics.

But first, let’s ask the question, “What’s wrong with the age-old standard project management packages like MS Project and Merlin?”

Well, they certainly do give you good tools to manage your projects, but they really have a strong tendency to get people focusing on the minute task levels of projects far too early in the inception phases of a project.

This means that you can easily lose sight of the main objectives of the project, or get so stuck in the details that you forget some important tasks or objectives.

But the planning for a successful project begins before that. There is a whole inception phase of the project where the relevant information is collected together and organized so that you have a clear understanding of the scope, time, cost, quality, resources, communications, risks and of course stakeholder requirements for the project.

Often this information is gathered as large specification documents which are hard to navigate around and understand the requirements, but all of these areas can benefit from the use of Mind Mapping, and you can create Mind Maps to represent each knowledge area, and have branches for the details and hyperlinks to other documents and resources where required.

As you start a project, you need to define what the major objectives are, and each one of these objectives will become a first level branch of the Mind Map, then for projects of any reasonable size these objectives get further broken down into sub-objectives that contribute to the achievement of the major objectives, or the major areas of work contributing to the overall objectives. So these become the second level branches like this. Finally it is broken down into actual tasks that must be performed, which are the leaf branches on your Mind Map.

Obviously this is flexible and you only use as many levels as necessary for your project, and for a large project, it may require more levels.

When you get down to the task level, you may want to assign resources to the tasks. This is something you can do in the Platinum edition of NovaMind. The video shows you how to create and assign resources to the branches. Of course the resources usually refer to people, but can also refer to other resources which have a limited availability, like vehicles and meeting rooms.

The video also shows you how to assign task information to the branches, including priorities, percentage complete, start and finish date and duration.

You can see how easy it is to structure your project into objectives and then go right down to the task and resource level using Mind Maps. This means that you can use brainstorming techniques to come up with the right ideas and objectives. The techniques used for brainstorming are covered in a different video.

As you go through the exercise, you will fully explore the options for the project in much more breadth and depth than what you could cover in a requirements document. Then you can do the assessment of the ideas and objectives, and make sure that the ones you want are retained, and then look at the budget and time constraints etc, and go through a scoping exercise.

Mind Maps are a great way to manage project scope because you can remove a branch or sub-branch without impacting the other branches.

This makes it easy to make sure that there is nothing forgotten in the early planning and scoping part of the project, as well as being a great tool for presenting the project to all the stakeholders.

If you are trying to get funding for a project, it makes it much easier when the project plan is drawn out as a Mind Map. Everyone can see what the objectives are for the project, how they are going to be achieved, the tasks that are required to achieve the outcomes, as well as the resources that are required. When the project sponsors see in the Mind Map all the things that need to be done to achieve their objectives, they will understand the basis for the project costs, and can make much better informed decisions on scoping and overall outcomes. This means that it is much more likely that they will accept the costings you have provided because they can see where their money is going - everyone can see clearly what the objectives are, how they are going to be achieved, and what resources are going to be required. They may also decide to take some of the main objective branches and move them to a new phase in the project so that it can be done properly, rather than trying to fit it in to an unreasonable timeframe.

But what if you need to bring someone up to speed on a project that is already underway?

Mind Maps are very useful in briefing new team members on the project. When a new team member is assigned to the project, the Mind Maps will give them a picture of the overall project goals, updating them very quickly. The Mind Maps give a graphical overview of the tasks, how they relate to each other and their importance and impact in the greater scheme of things.

The new team member can then be introduced to their individual role in the project and will be able to quickly see what their responsibilities are and how these responsibilities relate to the overall project, giving them a better understanding of what and how they will contribute to the team and the project. Often this will lead to them volunteering their skills for tasks you may not have assigned them to, because they understand that they can make a strong contribution to the project in that area.

You very quickly have their “buy-in” on the project, whether they are coming in at the start of the project or part way through. They can see exactly where they fit in, why they are needed and how they can contribute.

Now of course during the running of your project, you would use a dedicated project management package like MS Project or Merlin to handle the detailed running of the project, and you can transfer your project information to Merlin, or to any project management package that reads the MS Project XML file format (which is just about all the project management software currently available).

So as you can see, NovaMind is a great tool particularly for the inception phases of projects.

Watch the video now to hear about using Mind Maps for brainstorming requirements; scoping; time, cost and quality management, assigning resources, communicating project requirements, and managing risks. When you use Mind Mapping in this way, you will be able to manage the scope of projects better, make sure that no requirements are left out, have better communication with the stakeholders and sponsors, and have better buy in from your staff working on the project.

All these things add up to better managed and more successful projects.

 

 Flash Video: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

NovaMind is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the latest Mind Map Connection newsletter, which contains information about the latest developments in NovaMind, including:

Mind Manager import functions

MS Project import and export functions

Crossgrade discounts

New Mind Mapping tutorial videos and web pages about how to use Mind Mapping for various types of planning

The “back to school” site license sale starting on 3rd July with 50%+ off a limited number of site licenses. Although this was prompted by the tight funding within schools, it is also open to anyone who is feeling the pinch of tough economic times.

Here is the link to read the full newsletter:

http://www.novamind.com/mind-map-connection/mmc-2008-06-28.php

Enjoy!

Gideon

 

 What is Mind Mapping?: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 What are Mind Maps? [8:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 What are Mind Maps?: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Mind Maps are diagrams that work the way you think. They make it easy to understand, remember, and communicate complex information.

These days we are bombarded with so much information that it can be difficult to make sense of it all, and we suffer from information overload and overwhelm, which reduces our effectiveness.

Some of the problems we face are:

* inability to solve problems effectively,
* lack of creative thought,
* lack of focus,
* difficulty giving great presentations,
* problems organizing your thoughts,
* poor communication,
* missing out tasks when planning projects,
* forgetting important information, and
* lack of clarity and direction.

If you have suffered from any of these problems, Mind Mapping is for you. Mind Mapping gives you clarity and allows you to:

* organize your thoughts,
* remember information,
* communicate better,
* solve problems quickly and effortlessly,
* brainstorm new ideas,
* increase productivity by 20% or more,
* see the important issues,
* make better decisions, and
* give compelling presentations.

Why does Mind Mapping work?

Mind Maps organize the information in the same way your brain organizes information. This makes it very natural and easy to understand.

Our brains like thinking in pictures. The smooth curves and colorful pictures that are created when Mind Mapping create powerful images for your brain to remember.

We have two halves to our brains which think in different ways. The left half thinks linearly following direct linkages to related ideas. Our right brain likes to see the whole picture with colors and flow.

Mind Maps cater to both sides of the brain at the same time, which makes them a very good way of storing and recalling information, presenting things to other people, and brainstorming new ideas.

I have posted another article about Mind Mapping in your business on Squidoo.

In this article I explain how to use Mind Mapping for creating a company mission statement that everyone can “buy in” to, and then go on to discuss goal setting and achievement, planning a web site, and selling your ideas.

Mind Mapping provides a great tool to clarify what your business is all about, and strengthen your ability to deliver on your vision of the company.

Here is the URL of the article:  http://www.squidoo.com/Mind-Mapping-Clarifies-and-Strengthens-Your-Business