How to use Coggle to support team planning sessions
Picture the scene: you and your team are clustered around a whiteboard trying to generate ideas for your upcoming project. Everyone is talking over each other; the whiteboard is running out of space; the pen is running out of ink; and you’ve been trying to put forward your idea for the last 10 minutes, but loudmouth Dave just won’t stop butting in. It’s like a scene from The Office and it’s hard to imagine a more chaotic meeting.
Fast forward two weeks and now everyone’s working from home. This time you’re trying to map out your project plan and allocate tasks, all via multi-way video conferencing. Tracy’s got really bad feedback; Tim’s got a time lag and Sarah’s trying to take notes on a piece of paper that she keeps holding up to the screen. It was hard to imagine a more chaotic meeting, but somehow, it’s happened.
Using collaborative mind mapping software would be the perfect solution to both of these scenarios. These tools, such as Coggle, allow everybody to contribute their ideas without the shouting match, and the end result will be a much more organised, legible and actionable board of ideas.
There are different ways that you can use Coggle for team planning sessions, and the best approach to take will depend on your goals for the meeting.
The "free for all"
This is perfect for the start of a project, when you’re generating ideas. You put the title in the middle of the mind map, set any parameters that you need to, and let your team loose on it. Everyone has an equal chance to share their thoughts, and they can build on one another’s ideas in an organic way. You could use Coggle’s chat function or a video conferencing software simultaneously to give you the opportunity to ask one another questions as you go along, but personally I prefer to just let the initial ideas flow in silence.
Once everyone’s exhausted their creativity, you can then use the resulting mind map to have a much more focused discussion, asking individuals to expand on points that they have added to the document and focusing in on the best ideas. You can also easily reorganise ideas and prune down the mind map so that just those that need following-up are left. Alternatively, you might choose to keep the original mind map to refer back to for inspiration or ‘plan B’s’ as the project progresses.
The "drill-down" / "deep-dive"
You’ve probably all got your own management term for this phase of planning, but whatever you choose to call it, a mind map is the perfect tool to help you to map out the details of your project. You can use it for outlining objectives, deliverables and milestones, identifying, allocating and prioritising tasks, mapping out resources… the list goes on.
Using a mind map for this can help to keep your meetings much more tightly focused and ensure that you don’t forget to cover any key areas. Pre-populate your mind map to set out the agenda for your meeting and then add your notes as you discuss each area. Some mind mapping tools, including Coggle, will allow you to make links between different strands of the mind map, and to embed external links.
By the end of the meeting you’ll have a really clear visual representation of the project, helping your team to understand which tasks they are responsible for, how that relates to other aspects of the project, and who they need to liaise with on other elements of the project. It also ensures that you have a clear way to communicate this information to other stakeholders. The cherry on top? Research shows that conveying information in visual formats such as mind maps supports retention of information, meaning that your team are less likely to forget jobs on their ‘to-do’ list!
The Timeline
Mind maps don’t have to look like a spider’s web: they can be linear too and can be used draw up your project timeline. It’s an easy way to visually represent tasks that need to be happening simultaneously, and to see relationships between different strands of the project. To save time, you can even take the mind map that you used to originally map out your tasks and reformat it into a timeline.
These are just a few of the ways that mind mapping tools like Coggle can be used to support team planning sessions, both in-person and remotely. Play around to discover the full range of capabilities, or take a look at our gallery for more inspiration.
Have you used Coggle to support a team meeting? Comment and let us know how it went!
Posted by Catherine, March 2020.