Full Control of the Small and Middle Sized Projects – It Is So Easy!

With Mind2Chart Add-In For Mindjet MindManager Pro 7 and MindManager 8

Learn How Much Does Your Project Planning Really Cost for You

Irrespectively if you are professional or non-professional Project Manager your time costs a lot. You could spend it on the creative ideas development, solution of non-trivial tasks that nobody but you can do, on strategic planning or work with the project specific character – on everything that we love in Project Management.
Project Manager hourly rate varies much depending on industry and required experience. It can start at $60 and rich $200 and more. And it’s just factual cost – the value of creative ideas or strategic planning is hard to estimate. But even if we speak about $100 for an hour of your work – your time costs a lot.
Even if you are developing the plan of the successful learning year or working on some student research project – you could spend your time on developing the ideas that would work for your future.

How much time do you spend on the routine work in Project Planning? Observe Project Scope; build Work Breakdown Structure; create the schedule with all nuances and interdependencies… All of this eats up your time. Then you start allocating the resources – and each of them has its own nuances, for example, wants to go on leave in a certain time…
And how much time is spent to analyze the Project Plan, change it, check progress and represent it for the other stakeholders?
You spend some time even to go into the heart of the project and realize state of affairs.
Here we don’t mention those intellectual efforts that you make for this work instead of having an extra hour for healthy sleep.

7 Ways Your Time And Money Are Leaking By and 7 Properties of the Right Planning Tool

• Why should you spend your time on searching the button you need or selecting different menu items to perform some simple operation?

The research was conducted and it was discovered that a user spends about 2-5 seconds to find necessary item in the complicated GUI or switch between screens of different applications. For one session of work with such tasks as Project Management tasks a user performs about 20-40 such operations. Let’s take 3 seconds and 20 operations. Project Manager has 3-4 work sessions in a day. It’s just 3 minutes in a day… But it is 1 hour in a month. Or 100$ if we take such rate as an average.

Planning Tool should save your time when creating the Project Plan and working with it. Tool should be easy-to-use and optimally organized.

• Why should you spend your time on recalculating tasks dates and duration after adding a new task with dependencies; or on schedule restructuring after signing the permission for leave for your Team Leader?

Let’s evaluate the time lost here. Surely it depends much on a case and project complexity. Approximately to resolve such issue with common tools a user spend from 10 minutes to 1 hour. As research shows well planned project with low risks has 5-6 such issues in a month. Let’s take just 10 minutes and 6 issues – it is one more hour or 100$ in a month.

Planning Tool should save your time for making changes and at the same time take into account all details. Created Project Plan is to be comprehensible, full and agile.

• Why should you spend your time on looking trough all the bookmarks, all screens, reading comparing different notes when trying to imagine the full picture of the project?

A user spends 2-5 minutes to observe the project and make its picture in mind. Let’s take 3 minutes as difference between work time in the tool with good visualization and intricate one. It’s daily work – so it is 1 hour of routine work in a month or 100$ spent for bookmarks and screens.

Planning Tool should save your time on going into the heart of the project and observing the progress. Project Plan is to be represented in visual clear form as well as completeness notes.

• Why should you spend your time on recalculating task duration for each person with partial employment or involved in several tasks? Why should you remember about all the holidays including Company Birthday of your partners?

Let’s suppose that a user spend 30 minutes once in a month to deal with changed working schedule and new project team members and about 1-2 hours monthly to reallocate executors or other resources between tasks. It is about 2 hours monthly – or 200$.

Planning Tool should save your time on mistakes correction and let customize your schedule. Project Plan is to include the majority of meaningful details and nuances.

• Why should you spend your time on looking through all the tasks to detect the problem ones and analyzing their effect on other ones?

Time losses here mostly depend on how the process is organized. Very row and minimal estimations give about 30 minutes – 1 hour to do it. And it should be performed at least once in a week. Let’s take 30 minutes as time loss and we get 2 hours or 200$ in a month.

Planning Tool should save your time on Risk Management. It should give an opportunity to detect problems and analyze hidden risks.

• Why should you spend your time on collecting and entering all up-to-date information from your Team members and then sharing it?

Commonly a manager collects all team members reports, analyzes them and inputs the results into the joint plan and then shares it to all Team Members.  Research was conducted for two variants: when a manager does it daily – spending about 30 minutes in a day – and weekly – spending about 1.5 hour in a week. Let’s take the minimal variant – it will be 6 hours in a month or 600$.

Planning Tool should save your time on the team work. Project Plan is to be easily manageable and shareable.

• Why should you spend your time on composing reports for your clients and top management, creating invoices or selecting the main information?

A manager makes reports at least once in a month. Reports can be different – let’s take 3 types of them. To compose and review one report a manager spends from 1 – 1.5 hour. Let it be 3 hours in a month – it is 300$.

Planning Tool should save your time on Reporting. Reports about project status, estimations are to be automated.

If we sum all time and money costs we’ll get 16 hours or 1600$. That’s a lot – don’t you think so?

We’ve thought about these 7 points and created Mind2Chart add-in

• Mind Mapping technique
• Gantt charting
• WBS scheme

Key benefits:

• Complete integration in MindManager Pro 7®, MindManager  8, no external applications required.
• Intuitive interface, all common project management tasks are covered with no redundant extra functionality.
• No additional information, Mind2Chart add-in operates only with information that is visible and editable within MindManager® interface. Other members of project team can work with the plan even without the add-in installed.
• Two-way instant synchronization with the mind map.
• More...

Start to Save Your Time Now! – Save Up To $800 During The Evaluation Period!