Mind Mapping Tool to Improve Deliverables and Efficiency

Challenge

I am working as an auditor in the pharmaceutical company. As a team, we have to complete the given  number of audits in a year. Because of the size of the operations units, it’s not possible to complete  the audit in the given time and as a team, we lack deliverables. There are multiple reasons for the  delay in audit closure including internal and external factors like detailed focus in certain areas by the  team and cross functional team agreements on the points noted, stakeholders availability, priority in  the production unit, other audits which are going on parallel in the unit.

Selection

To overcome the above challenges first I decided to work on internal factors and selected the Mind  mapping tool to overcome with ideas for reducing the audit timeline and easy agreement of the cross- functional team stakeholders. As mentioned in the video by professor Annu Sharma (Week 3), the  mind mapping tool can be used to find the pattern and themes to produce insights and solutions to  the given problem. I used this tool to find the specific areas where we are doing the delay as a team  and tried to find out the insights and solutions for our challenge.

Application

To start with using the tool, we collected data from internal and external stakeholders regarding  factors affecting audit timelines. Further, we have given sticky notes to each member in team and  external stakeholders to provide solution on each selected factor that is affecting audit timelines.

For Example:

1. Conducting individual meetings for observation clarification and receiving an action

plan was taking a lot of time as there are more than 10 stakeholders from various  departments. The team decided to do the common meeting with stakeholders under  the forum “Point clarification, agreement and action plan”. This brought down 10  hours of meetings to 1.5 Hours.

2. One of the ideas came from mind mapping the exercise was to review the audit

progress every week instead of once in a two week, which given us the indicator on  which we have push and get the things done.

Insight

This particular tool has given me a lot of insights. As an individual, I could give one or two solutions for  the given challenge whereas in the team we are getting more solutions and easier to implement.  Further, the factors affecting the audit timelines are broadened when they are out for discussion  during the mind mapping tool sessions.

For example, in one internal factor, my team was spending a lot of time for review in the areas which  is least important to business, during the mind mapping session it comes out as an insight point and  we changed the review focus on selecting the business important area/scope to spend more time and  adjust the review time for the low important areas.

Approach

The selected tool created a lot of insights in the design thinking process as it helped to  understand “what is?” in details and simultaneously provided the focus on “what if?”. The mind  mapping tool provided a lot of ideas/solutions to tackle the given challenge. The audit timeline has  improved a lot and we are now able to finish the audits in the given timeline.

The tools like the storytelling of learning launch may not be that much useful as Mind Mapping Tool  as the challenge involves a lot of stakeholders and need to view the challenge from everyone’s  perspective.

Next time I may use the learning from visualization tool to connect the dots between various  stakeholders and their expectation from audit team to make it more robust.

