NovaMind News

It was recently announced that there would be integration between NovaMind and iThoughts, giving you the capability to exchange files between these two top of the range Mind Mapping applications.

This video shows you how easy it is to transfer MindMaps back and forth between NovaMind and iThoughts. The demonstration is done using NovaMind for Mac, but works equally well with NovaMind for Windows.

For further information about iThoughts, and to get your copy of NovaMind or iThoughs, please visit http://www.novamind.com/ithoughts

 

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Mind Mapping is a powerful tool for all forms of planning, and we have already seen how we can use it for project planning, but let’s extend that to talk specifically about strategic planning.

This video references a number of Mind Maps that you can download from NovaMind Connect, so here are the specific links so you can download the Mind Maps:

Strategic planning: why do it?, SWOT analysis, Strategic plans: what do they contain?

Business continuity planning, response and recovery

Strategic planning can seem like a hassle when you just want to get on and run the business, but there are a lot of reasons for creating strategic plans, as you can see here:

• they are very important for setting the long term direction of the company so you know what the company will look like in 5 or 10 years
• they form a framework for decision making when you are doing your business planning
• they are a framework for your operational planning and help you set your priorities, product lines, levels of service, and identify your target market
• they enable you to very clearly explain the business to employees, contractors, stakeholders in the business, strategic partners, and customers
• they allow you to get a clear picture of the difference between your current position and where you want to be long term, and therefore stimulate change in the right direction
• and they form a basis for accountability of both the staff (especially senior staff) and the plans you make at lower levels, like business and marketing plans.

So what should the strategic plans contain? Here is a list of some of the main items:

• the vision of where the company is going in the medium to long term
• the mission of the company – what it is all about
• the values of the company, explaining why you exist
• your specific objectives as a company
• what strategies you will use to achieve your objectives
• and the goals along the way, so you can plan to meet those goals and be able to measure your progress

For your strategic plan, you could start with a Mind Map with the main headings as in the example in the video and add sub-branches for each element, but you would probably end up with a huge Mind Map, so what I would suggest is that you download this Mind Map from NovaMind Connect, and for each of the top level branches, decide what is important for you and adjust the second level branches to suit your needs, and then for each top level branch, use the “new map from branch” option to create a new Mind Map for each of them, and then brainstorm the details under what have now become the first level branches of the detail maps.

One important part of the strategic planning process is doing a SWOT analysis, where you identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for your business. Using more traditional methods of doing SWOT analysis, you just consider all the strengths first, and then all the weaknesses and so on. One of the advantages of doing this using Mind Maps is that you can be open to use brainstorming techniques where you come up with ideas that relate to all four areas in any order, and you can attach them to the Mind Map as branches at the appropriate place as you think of them.

We do have a SWOT template built in to NovaMind so you can create a Mind Map based on that template, but there’s also this extended SWOT analysis template available on NovaMind Connect, which may help direct your thinking in appropriate directions for strategic and business planning.

When you have gone through the strategic planning process and identified the detailed vision, mission, values, objectives, strategies and goals, it is often useful to feed the main points back to an overall strategic plan Mind Map which you can then make into a poster for your office, and can also include with a company prospectus or bids for contracts etc. This helps everyone within the company or associated with the company in any way understand what the company is all about, and where they fit in to the accomplishment of those objectives.

Another specific strategic thing to consider is business continuity planning. Using a Mind Map such as this, again the brainstorming structure of Mind Maps comes in handy to take these ideas and build out a picture of the risks that your business faces, and then build a risk mitigation plan.

Then at the other end of the spectrum, you have the response and recovery plan and here we can use the same techniques we used for project planning and management, to ensure that everyone understands the objectives, their roles and responsibilities, and how to effect a speedy recovery from any disaster. It is at times like that, that you need to have the clear and efficient communication that is provided by Mind Maps.

So as you can see, using Mind Maps for strategic planning helps make sure all aspects of the plan are dealt with properly, in a way that everyone can understand what the strategic direction of the company is, and how you are going to achieve it.

Now the next obvious thing to be doing with Mind Maps is business planning, so we will cover that in the next video.

 

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