Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge

I am a mechanical engineering student, For our Bachelor thesis we are working on a topic to create  common platform for manufacturing and logistics. With focus on reducing labor cost, increasing  transparency among the processes and driving digitization. The project scope includes qualitative research  by our group of four students, taking interviews of business professionals from respective domains such  as value stream manager, manufacturing process expert, operations manager etc. from automotive  industries. Scope of our thesis is limited to automotive industries as they are in the major transition phase  and are already implementing change management concepts. The time line for our thesis is four months.

Selection

We have already went through ‘’Design Thinking’’ workshops at our university, so we are implementing  mind mapping tool in our thesis. As this tool helps to understand the insights and segregate large amount  of data.

Application

During our initial phase of thesis we had huge data from literature, inputs from the interviews that we  conducted. Our deadline for data representation was two weeks and for data extraction(survey conducted  with professionals), we had another two weeks. Before implementation of ‘’Mind Mapping’’ it was chaos  of data. It became difficult to analyze which data we actually need, which will play crucial role to put  forward our findings.

After data collection, we implemented mind-mapping tool to create theoretical base for our idea. Figure1  shows our structure of data mining that we came up after using mind mapping. In the first phase we  reviewed all data we have and segregated data into four types such as data from qualitative research,  state of the art, survey conducted with professionals and future scope. Then each one of us took  responsibility of one type. In every weekly meeting with our Professor we did presentation on data  analysis, data representation, data extraction and future scope.

Figure 1 Data mining

• Furute scope • Interviews

with  professionals

• State of the

art

• Qualitative

research

Data

representation Data Analysis

Presentation  of findings

Data

extraction

Insight and Approach

After implementing mind-mapping tool in our academic work, our team identified our assumptions and  helped us to come with new ideas. For example one of the focus element of our thesis is increasing  transparency along processes but how was missing in our study. This segregation of data helped us to  rethink on our scope of thesis and how it could be achieved within time frame of four months.  We made  three sections of data namely green, yellow and red. Out of these, green section needed no filter, we used  it directly, for yellow section we filtered our data and made sticky notes with main points that we may  need in our further studies, and for red section each one of us made own sticky notes boards including  points that we thought will be helpful followed by brain storming session.

We realized that mind mapping saved our time we met our deadline of data mining. In our upcoming  phase of thesis, we will try to do it in stepwise manner, as it was our first attempt to implement design- thinking tool practically in academic work. Workshops at our university made our concepts clear about  the design thinking and made our base strong in the same. This course by ‘’Coursera’’ has helped us in  actual implementation of design thinking tool.

We hope to receive a feedback how we could have done it in a better way.

