Reflection – Mind mapping

Challenge    I work in the IT department of my organization, and we had to understand and solve a  problem that was very common in the regulatory department. The analysts of this  department often have to prepare a new norm or regularization related to a problem  identified internally in our organization or because of a new law that must be fulfilled.  To develop the new regulation, they must think, study and search for every impact that  it will take inside and outside the organization. To accomplish this job, they need to  access data inside the organization and do analytics and other studies to finally finish  their first job, which is the regulatory analysis impact.  The problem with this task is to find, access and understand the data related to the new  regulation.     Selection    We worked together creating a mind mapping to visualize everything that was  connected to this task. A Mind Map is an easy way to brainstorm thoughts organically  without worrying about order and structure. It allows you to visually structure your  ideas to help with analysis and recall. It is a diagram for representing tasks, words,  concepts, or items linked to and arranged around a central concept or subject. We chose  this tool because it is very flexible to insert information related to the subject and  because it is easy to use.  We made a diagram to relate the personas, the tools used to search for data, the other  departments involved, and everything that was interacting or influencing (positively or  negatively) to conclude that job.  We used this tool manually; we draw it in a white board using different pen colors.    Application    With the visualization of all items related, we were able to organize the similar ideas  and similar situations and have some ideas to improve the process of accessing the data,  understand them and finally be able to implement the analysis (the regulatory impact).  With the mind mapping, we were able to see and select where we could act first, trying  something new to help to solve the problem, or, at least, to minimize it. We wanted to  try a first solution and check if it would help in this way.   So, we started to catalog the organization data with some metadata to help the analysts  to quickly find the information they need for a specific job. It was not the perfect  solution, but it was a beginning and, indeed, it has been used and will be improved to  accomplish more needs.    Insight  Using the mind mapping tool was a very good experience for everybody (IT and  regulatory analysts), because we were able to visualize more clearly the aspects of the  problem, who was involved in some situations and what problems we had. With that  tool we could understand better each other, “speak the same language” and focus on  solutions.

Approach  For next time, we will use more digital tools to save the progress of this work, so that  we will be able to evolve our mind mapping over time. Other approach that we could  have used for this case was storytelling. We could have some stories narrated by  regulatory analysts to make explicit their difficulties in doing their job.

