Example Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge

When I was working as a consultant, we had a Project in wich we worked directly with the client.  After a few months, we realised that there were some problems in our working process that was  causing tensions, missunderstandings and this was affecting the productivity of the team directly.

It was a consequence of two diferentes teams, clients and consultings, working together. The main  difficults were to understant each one’s roles and their edges, to manage the expectations and the  deliverables and to manage the planning risks.

Selection

To solve the problem we mainly used de SCRUM methodology. One of its prnciples is continuous  improvement and the tool we chose to achieve itw as the Mind Mapping.

Application

Every end of the month we set a 45 minutes metting with every person working for the project to  talk about the past 30 days. Our mind mapping was compose of three columns : What positive things  happened that I wanted it to occur again, what things happened that can be fixed, what happened  that shoud not occur again. Post-its were distributed for everyone and we had between 15 and 20  minutes to brainstorm, fill the post-its and fix them on the respective column on the wall. After we  finished, aleach one would explain their notes. The manager responsable for conducting the meeting  would then make a review and propose some actions to fix the the points located at the two last  columns. Each participant then would be responsable for one or more actions and the next month  we would review the improvements of the month.

Insight & Approach

The mind mapping technique allows everyone to participate activily of the change without expending  a lot of time. From using this technique we could see that the positive column were more and more  crowded and the las column were more and more empty. We also realized that while we were all  facing problems and exposing them, a team spirit were created. The integration was improved  significantly.

