Mind mapping in project management using Wrike and Klaxoon

What is mind mapping in project management?

Mind mapping in project management offers a visual way to organize information and view ideas. It helps project managers visualize and arrange their thoughts as an alternative to traditional linear project planning.

While they can follow different formats, mind maps are usually centered around one main idea, with key points and details radiating outward.

For example, if you wanted to create a mind map to help you project-manage a product launch, you might follow the below steps:

1. Write “Product launch” in the middle of a page.
2. In a circular formation, write five key associated actions like “Finalize product packaging,” “Create a marketing plan,” and “Complete product testing.”
3. Draw a line from the mind map topic to each main idea. 
4. Beneath each idea, brainstorm supporting details such as tasks and assignees.
5. Draw lines connecting each main idea to its supporting details. 

When you’re finished, the mind map should look like a sunburst or spiderweb of interconnecting ideas. This type of visual representation is thought to replicate the way the brain works, bouncing around to find, connect, and generate information rather than following straight lines of text back and forth. Mind maps allow project managers to plan more naturally, tapping into deeper thoughts and more innovative ideas. 

For a better picture of how it works, check out Klaxoon’s explainer video here.

What is Tony Buzan’s mind-mapping technique?

While humans have always practiced visual learning and thinking, mind mapping is thought to have been conceptualized by psychologist Tony Buzan in the 1970s. While studying at the University of British Columbia, he noticed that the most academically successful students had messy notes filled with diagrams, doodles, and drawings. This note-taking method seemed to help them retain information, unlike his traditional written notes. 

According to a profile in the Irish Times, he trademarked the term “mind map” and developed the concept “as a way of helping students make notes that used only keywords and images.” He discovered that many of the world’s greatest thinkers, creators, and scientists also defaulted to a type of mind mapping, whether it was Leonardo da Vinci’s doodles or Charles Darwin’s diagrams.

Buzan’s work has been so influential that he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. The reason? “[Mind mapping] helps individuals to find their global vision, their purpose in life, and therefore creating more peacefulness, more enthusiasm, more creativity, more forward-moving individuals, more multiple intelligent thinking.”

What tools can I use for mind mapping?

In the past, mind mapping was as simple as putting a pen to paper or sticking Post-its on a wall — both straightforward but limited methods. These days, technology has taken mind mapping to a whole new level, offering advanced opportunities for more complex commercial use cases.

Powered by Klaxoon, Wrike’s visual collaboration tools can help thousands of companies organize and represent their ideas visually and logically. Our mind-mapping software experts have even built a mind map template to get your team started quickly. 

Ideal for ideation workshops, brainstorming sessions, and project goals planning meetings, this template will help you structure your ideas using shapes, colors, and connectors. For example, when our content production team decided to focus on visual collaboration tools this year, we used this Klaxoon template to make the most of our combined creative skills. 

It was as easy as following these eight simple steps:

1. First, I invited my team members to a Klaxoon whiteboard.
2. I typed “Visual collaboration content” as a central idea.
3. I selected the style, color, and number of branches I needed.
4. I asked participants to send their content ideas to the board.
5. We added key information to each idea, including due dates and assignees.
6. We toggled between different views, colors, and categories when viewing ideas.
7. I asked the team to clarify and expand on ideas using the Question tool.
8. Once the mind map was completed, I copied it into a Roadmap to start turning our ideas into actions!

What’s great about this mind map template is that it can be shared widely among remote workers and multinational teams such as ours, allowing us to collaborate, communicate, and co-create in real time from anywhere in the world.

Plus, all that good work is instantly stored and saved for future reference — unlike the Post-its of the past, which inevitably ended up on the floor or in the trash bin at the end of the day. It’s the ideal solution for all types of teams, bringing people together, generating real creativity, and kick-starting projects fast.

How can I use mind mapping in project management?

While mind maps are often used in academic settings to help students take notes, write essays, and revise for exams, they have many practical applications in modern workplaces as well.

Here at Wrike, we’ve been experimenting with mind maps ever since we acquired Klaxoon. The tool is a breeze to use, offering a fun and efficient way of improving our end-to-end project management, helping us to:

• Brainstorm ideas: Mind maps allow our creativity to shine by free-writing ideas in a centralized place, all stored in the cloud.
• Plan projects: We define project scope, objectives, deliverables, and timelines by using a mind map in the initial planning stages.
• Build a work breakdown structure: We can divide a complex project plan into smaller, more manageable tasks in a mind map.
• Assess project risk: Identifying potential problems in a mind map helps us prepare solutions ahead of time.
• Create stakeholder plans: We use mind maps to assign and categorize project roles and responsibilities.
• Manage resources: We will often use mind maps to check that we have sufficient resources to manage our projects.
• Capture communications: Our project management mind maps help us take note of the most important parts of meetings or planning sessions.
• Visualize milestones: While Gantt charts are great for bringing timelines to life, mind maps can help us establish key project tasks along the way.
• Summarize project documents: We often condense large tracts of text into key areas of focus using mind maps.
• Track project progress: Our teams check in on key projects by sketching a mind map that flags outstanding or at-risk tasks.

Mind mapping is just one of Wrike’s wide array of tools designed to make work flow through every part of a modern enterprise, connecting each stage from ideation to completion.

Sony Pictures Television, for example, has found that Wrike’s platform is “the skeleton to the production madness that keeps everyone organized and accountable for what they’re assigned to,” according to Nicki Batelli, Vice President of Operations and Production. Since becoming Wrike users, her team members have seen an astonishing 90% reduction in emails and now take 40% less time to deliver projects.

[Wrike] also takes a lot of the guesswork out of what needs to be done, who is talking to whom, and how that communication flow is expected to work — all the protocols set by our Wrike workflow allow our creatives to actually spend their time being creative.

Nicki Batelli, Vice President of Operations and Production