Another Piece of the Mind Mapping for Project Management Puzzle

Following on my two pre­vi­ous posts on the sub­ject of mind map­ping (here and here), I have recently found another piece of my “mind map­ping for project man­age­ment” puzzle.

I’m cur­rently devel­op­ping my project plan­ning and track­ing method­ol­ogy based on mind maps made with MindManager and I am deter­min­ing both what spe­cific maps I’ll use and what are the exact client deliv­er­ables I’ll cre­ate from them. One par­tic­u­lar aspect I’ve often had trou­ble with is deter­min­ing a project’s sched­ule. I’ve now found the per­fect tool to help me with this pocess and it is a plu­gin for MindManager called JCVGantt Pro.

As the name implies, JCVGantt Pro cre­ates Gantt charts which are a sta­ple of project man­age­ment method­olo­gies. I had never used Gantt charts pre­vi­ously even­though I knew what they were (my other project track­ing appli­ca­tion Studiometry has them) but I had never used them before because, for me at least, they were a pain to cre­ate directly.

The amaz­ing thing with JCVGantt Pro is that it ties directly into MindManager maps and updates you make in one app are directly reflected into the other. What this means is that, from a spec­i­fi­ca­tions map for exam­ple, I can sep­a­rate each item into smaller spe­cific tasks which I can time esti­mate more eas­ily and cre­ate depen­den­cies between them using rela­tion­ships. When I then sent that to JCV Gantt Pro it cre­ates a time­line for the project as a Gantt chart and I can track tasks as they get done.

But the really great thing I dis­cov­ered which I didn’t know about pre­vi­ously is that, in JCV Gantt Pro and prob­a­bly in other sim­i­lar soft­ware, I can give each task a “resource”. Resources can be any­thing from spe­cific items like fonts or stock images you need to pur­chase (whose cost goes towards the project total) but, more impor­tantly in this case, “human resources”. The human resource con­cept is very sig­nif­i­cant because it defines how much time a “human resource” can devote to tasks within each week and the hourly cost of each “resource”. The time per week con­cept is impor­tant for me because I am a one man oper­a­tion and I can devote only a spe­cific amount of hours each week­day to Web work and slightly more on week­ends. What that means is that, not only does JCVGantt Pro cal­cu­lates the cost of the project based on all the tasks and their allo­cated resources but it “spreads” the work across the time­line accord­ing to the time con­straints of each resource.

In short, if a project required 100 hours to com­plete in total and I could work 40 hours a week on week­days and not on week­ends then it would require 2 ¹⁄₂ weekes to com­plete the project. Since, in real­ity I can only devote about 22 hours a week to Web work (at best) spread on all 7 days of the week, the same project would take me over 4 ¹⁄₂ weeks to com­plete and JCVGantt Pro will deter­mine that auto­mat­i­cally and draw the Gantt chart accord­ingly. It even goes fur­ther into spread­ing resources across con­cur­rently run­ning tasks and mov­ing tasks that depend on the com­ple­tion of pre­vi­ous ones fur­ther on the timeline.

I really wish I had dis­coverd all those incred­i­ble tools ear­lier. Not only do MindManager maps help me keep track of all project spe­cific info in one place but, with the help of JCV Gantt Pro, I can now give clients real­is­tic sched­ules and get much bet­ter cost esti­mates than ever before. My first project using this new method­ol­ogy is tak­ing me longer than usual to com­plete but from that project I will be able to cre­ate the map tem­plates I will re-​use on every future project..

There is a sig­nif­i­cant time invest­ment in the learn­ing process in addi­tion to the cost of the soft­ware the soft­ware for a one man shop like mine but I would really encour­age other free­lancers and small Web shops to explore sim­i­lar method­olo­gies if you are not already using them. It’s really prov­ing to work very well for me and will remove a lot of the tedium of project man­age­ment tasks that used to slow down projects for me. Not only that, it will help me cre­ate bet­ter early clients deliv­er­ables (spec­i­fi­ca­tion doc­u­ments, cre­ative briefs, proposals/quotations, etc) but it will also help me cre­ate bet­ter qual­ity projects.