About Use Cases

Use Cases for Businesses

There are a host of scenarios where visual thinking and mind mapping can help you in conducting your daily business affairs. It boosts both your personal productivity and facilitates collaboration and communicating with peers and clients.

Today's decisions need to grasp both the macro as well as micro details of an issue. Visualizing the relevant elements of a proposal speeds up comprehension and decision making. Below are representations of how and where mind maps can help you conduct both day-to-day and long term business goals.

Meeting Management

Mind maps are immensely useful for managing meetings. Prepare the agenda ahead of the meeting in a mind map, then distribute it with a few clicks using the built-in Share function. MindMeister will tell you who has looked at the agenda, and who still needs to. Participants can the add their own items to the list, ensuring all topics are covered in the meeting.

Then, when the meeting starts you just extend your map with meeting notes as you go, working your way down the agenda. Check off completed topics and assign tasks to the participants using the simple WunderTask function. If the discussion jumps back and forth – as it frequently does in meetings – that’s not a problem as you can just move and rearrange topics and notes freely within your map. Finally, move unfinished topics to the agenda of next week’s meeting and wrap up with last todos and action items. Your meeting map now serves as up-to-date protocol of everything that was discussed. It can still be extended, annotated and approved by everyone involved – including team members who could not make the actual meeting.

Sample Meeting Minutes Map

Account Planning

Due to their visual nature, mind maps are often used for account planning purposes in sales-driven environments. By setting up one mind map per key account you can get a quick overview of the status of a deal. Write down each stakeholder of the account and their potential influence on the success of the deal, reducing unwanted disturbances.

Manage competitors present in the deal in a separate branch, linking from there to the respective competition mind map (see Competitive Analysis / SWOT use case below). You can plan and prepare upcoming meetings and deadlines and discuss strategy with your colleagues in presales, marketing and upper management. The information in a mind map stays concise and lets you focus on what's important rather than getting lost in the gritty details.

Sample Account Planning Map

Project Management

Essentially, mind mapping is a planning technique. Mind maps help you structure complex topics and contents and keep track of tasks and issues. Therefore, mind maps are frequently used for lightweight project management, especially in the start phase of projects. Get started with planning by just entering anything that comes to mind with regard to the project into an empty template map.

You can do this yourself, or together with your project partners and team members in an online brainstorming session. From here, you can start categorizing topics, adding milestones, assigning first tasks and enter constraints and considerations. Your vision of what the project entails will become much clearer as you go through the mind mapping process.

Use MindMeister's task management features to assign action items with priorities and completion and due dates to your team members. Aspects of a task can be intuitively set using icons and the built-in notification and reminder functions making sure no one misses a deadline. You can also subscribe to iCalendar task feeds and track them from other applications.

Sample Project Management Map

Competitive Analysis / SWOT

Every market has its unique set of stakeholders. There are the incumbents, rule makers, rule breakers, newcomers, you name it. Mind maps help you to visualize these dependencies and make it a lot easier the draw conclusions once you get a better picture of the ecosystem you do business in.

SWOT Analysis - a popular method of outlining the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of a given proposal, (see Wikipedia) - is a specific use case that takes advantage of the radial nature of mind maps for a clear, intuitive and visually stimulating presentation and easier comprehension. Our template map contains explanations of the main SWOT concepts to help you get started right away.

Drawing up a mind map for each of your competitors will allow you get a quick and concise overview of of your opponent's strengths and weaknesses, in general or for a specific project. Each of your sales people will be able to add their own experiences to the shared map, or bits of information that they've heard from their clients, and the competition map will become a living, up-to-date source of business critical information.

Sample SWOT Analysis Map

More Use Cases

• Giving Presentations
  Take advantage of slide tiredness and communicate effectively through stimulating mind map based presentations
  
• Event Preparation
  Gather all aspects of an important event in one place, assign tasks to everyone involved and stay on top of things as the big day is nearing
  
• Website Planning
  Draw up the navigation and content structure of your website in a mind map, rearranging topics and headings as the hierarchy becomes clearer
  
• Innovation / Change Management
  Open yourself up to ideas from your employees by setting up wiki-style suggestion and idea maps and brainstorm with collagues online
  
• Problem Solving
  Present current issues in a mind map and collect input and ideas from all stakeholders, resulting in a quick resolution of the problem
  
• Note Taking
  Whether in a meeting, on the phone or just working by yourself, write down notes, ideas and tasks in your personal mind map