NovaMind News

Integrating Mind Mapping Techniques with Microsoft Project and Microsoft Project Server, Creating Powerful New Project Management Tool

Bonn, Brisbane, Phoenix – September 16, 2009 – A powerful new combination of project planning software packages, enabling business managers to develop comprehensive project plans in even faster and more effective ways, was announced today by Wodey Informationssysteme and NovaMind Software. ProjectLINKER for NovaMind 5, developed by Wodey Informationssysteme, Bonn, Germany, and NovaMind Software, Australia, elegantly couples the latest business mapping software, “NovaMind 5”, with the latest “Microsoft Office Project”, letting enterprise teams plan, map, track and clearly understand their activities as never before.

For more information and screenshots of the new plugin in action, please visit http://www.novamind.com/projectlinker

Through ProjectLINKER for NovaMind 5, project plans and data are bi-directionally synchronized between NovaMind and Microsoft Office Project as well as Microsoft Project Server. This allows organizations to gain unprecedented visibility into their resources, as all projects, complex and small, can be tracked in Microsoft Office Project Server. The solution now makes it faster and easier to report project status in a visual intuitive format to executives and client stakeholders. Without further training, business managers will have access to resource availability during the initial planning phases resulting better business decisions, more accurate plans and more realistic expectations.

ProjectLINKER for NovaMind 5 offers business leaders clarity and transparency in their project portfolios. Additionally, teams can record project history, status, and multi-project overviews – all with graphical indicators to enhance visual reporting. The use of ProjectLINKER for NovaMind 5 for project planning can accelerate the deployment of Microsoft Project Server 2007. Due to its powerful, yet easy planning capabilities, even the smallest projects can be planned and tracked in Microsoft Office Project Server.

ProjectLINKER for NovaMind 5 will be presented for the first time in the Microsoft Office Project Conference, September 14 – 17 2009 in Phoenix, AZ. Wodey Informationssysteme will demonstrate the tool during the conference and will have a booth in the exhibition hall as well. Also, both companies, Wodey Informationssysteme and NovaMind will announce their partnership on the Project Conference. In Germany, the product will be presented on the Microsoft exhibition stand on the “discuss & discover” – platform from October 20 – 22, 2009 in Munich, as Wodey Informationssysteme is going to be one of the 20 Microsoft partners in Germany.

The German and English product versions of ProjectLINKER for NovaMind will be available soon. Please keep yourself updated through http://www.novamind.com/projectlinker

About Wodey Informationssysteme

Wodey Informationssysteme is being valued as a leading specialist in the field of enterprise-wide implementation of visual and holistic project management programmes. The service portfolio ranges from a first analysis, over the to-be-concept and a pilot model to the realisation of the project. After the implementation process customer-specific requests will be fulfilled and all parties involved will be trained according to their different roles and responsibilities. Wodey Informationssysteme offers training and coaching programmes as well as support for professional project management.

The company is a Microsoft Premier Project Partner, and has a lot of experience with Mind Mapping, having previously developed a version of ProjectLinker for Mind Manager, but have now stopped developing for Mind Manager, in favor of working with NovaMind. Reiner Wodey, Managing Director, holds a membership at the Microsoft Partner Advisory Council in Redmond, USA. Wodey Informationssysteme is headquartered in Bonn, Germany and is being represented in 13 additional countries. For more information, visit www.wodey.de

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 5 is set to take Mind Mapping beyond where any Mind Mapping software has been before, making Mind Mapping even more powerful, intuitive and fun.

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

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.

 

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PowerPoint Export

NovaMind for Mac received a significant update today with the ability to export Mind Maps directly from NovaMind to PowerPoint.

This capability opens up new sharing opportunities where there is a need to brainstorm ideas using Mind Mapping techniques, and yet to share the information using more “traditional” presentation software.

Although NovaMind for Mac used to have similar functionality, it did not work with the latest version of PowerPoint, and so we took the opportunity to completely rewrite the PowerPoint export in such a way that it no longer requires PowerPoint to be installed on your computer for the export to work.

The files produced are the new PPTX files used by PowerPoint 2007 for Windows and PowerPoint 2008 for Mac.

Here is a video of the export procedure and results:

Standard text styles are used wherever possible to make sure that when you apply a theme to your presentation in PowerPoint, the styles are applied consistently throughout the presentation.

Images on the branches are transferred to the presentation, and the branch notes become speaker notes.

This makes the transition from your NovaMind Mind Map to your PowerPoint presentation almost instantaneous.

PowerPoint export is available immediately as a free update to NovaMind 4 Platinum and NovaMind 4 Pro, and requires Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) to function.

MS Project Export and Import

For some time, the Mac edition of NovaMind Platinum has had the ability to add project related information like start and finish dates, percentage complete, priorities, and assign resources to the branches on the Mind Maps, and then import the project information into Merlin project manager for Mac.

While this is a really good solution, we realize that many of you are using other project management software. The Microsoft Project file format has become the de facto standard for project management applications, so no matter which project management software you use, it is almost certain that you will be able to use the MS Project format.

This means that you can carry out the project inception phases in NovaMind, brainstorming your ideas and working out the project’s scope and objectives, then export into Microsoft Project format for detailed project management.

During the project, if you need to bring someone new on to the project or brainstorm solutions to particular problems in the project, you can either import the whole project file into NovaMind, or export a portion of the project plan from your project management package and open it in NovaMind, and work with it in NovaMind. Using the Mind Map format makes it easy to see the interrelationships between objectives and requirements and tasks within the scope of the project, which makes it a powerful tool for both understanding where all the different pieces of the project fit together, and also for designing solutions to project related issues.

The Microsoft Project import and export functionality is available immediately as a free update for NovaMind 4 Platinum for Mac users, and requires Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) to function.

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Merlin 2.6 with web publishing capabilities.

With the Web Sharing module, you can publish your project file over the web either as a live HTML document so you can collaborate with other users over the web or as a static HTML page that you can share with the team.

This feature opens the door for all users who wish to use Merlin but can’t because they are tied to an operating system other than Mac OS X. By publishing your Merlin project file using Merlin application and its Web Module add on, you can allow any user to access the project and collaborate with you on it only using their web browser.

Here is a project that has been shared using Web Sharing – as you can see, it has just about all the features of Merlin available to the whole team on the web.

The update from earlier versions of Merlin 2 is free, but a separate license is required for the web sharing capabilities. The web sharing licenses can be purchased from the NovaMind online store.

Merlin 2.6 also has a wide range of bug fixes, and enhancements to things like Microsoft Project import, and application of styles.

Microsoft Project Import and Export

For some time, the Windows edition of NovaMind Platinum has had the ability to add project related information like start and finish dates, percentage complete, priorities, and assign resources to the branches on the Mind Maps.

Unlike the Mac version of NovaMind which can be imported directly into Merlin, the Windows edition did not have any way of getting the information over into a project management package.

Now that has all changed with the introduction of both import and export of Microsoft Project XML files. This means that you can carry out the project inception phases in NovaMind, brainstorming your ideas and working out the project’s scope and objectives, then export into Microsoft Project format for detailed project management.

The Microsoft Project file format has become the de facto standard for project management applications, so no matter which project management software you use, it is almost certain that you will be able to use the MS Project format.

During the project, if you need to bring someone new on to the project or brainstorm solutions to particular problems in the project, you can either import the whole project file into NovaMind, or export a portion of the project plan from your project management package and open it in NovaMind, and work with it in NovaMind. Using the Mind Map format makes it easy to see the interrelationships between objectives and requirements and tasks within the scope of the project, which makes it a powerful tool for both understanding where all the different pieces of the project fit together, and also for designing solutions to project related issues.

The Microsoft Project import and export functionality is available immediately as a free update for NovaMind Platinum for Windows users, and will be integrated into the NovaMind Platinum Mac product shortly.

Mind Manager Import

The Pro and Platinum editions of NovaMind for Windows also now have the capability of importing Mind Manager files. We have a lot of users who have a number of old Mind Maps that they want to convert to NovaMind format and work with in NovaMind, and people who receive Mind Manager files from colleagues, so we have built this capability into the Windows version of NovaMind Pro and Platinum.

Mind Manager import and export has been in the Mac version of NovaMind for several years, but the techniques we are using in the Windows product gives a better result, so we are going to be porting the new Windows import capability over to the Mac, and it will be available shortly.

To get the latest version, just do a check for updates in NovaMind and download the latest version.