Mind Mapping Tool

Challenge & Selection

Mind mapping is a one of the tool that I usually encourage my team to use when we come into a  brainstorming workshop. One of the key challenges we are facing today  is about having  too many  data points, so many ideas, as well as so many problems we want to resolve which make us  so  confused how should we moving  forwards and in what direction. In order to get everyone on the  same pace and to share understanding of  how things are connected, using  mind mapping tool can  help  illustrate the relationships of each block (which could be anything -customers, processes,  issues, pain points, cost, risk, dependency, etc.)

One of my team’s key accountability  is to manage the end to end life cycle of about 200,000 EDC  (Electronics Data Capture) machines which were deployed at the merchants through out  the  country. Off course, there are so many challenges we are facing today, for examples,

1. How can we know all the machines are still there at the merchants and being used properly

and happily.

2. How to maximize the usage of the machines to generate the maximum revenue to the bank.  3. How to keep track and control the movement of all the machines end to end starting from

stock,  installed, repaired, dead,  until write off.

4. How to make sure the bank is not overpaying maintenance fees of the unused machines.

We were very frustrated most of the time when we found all the inventory related reports cannot  be reconciled and didn’t address the challenges we have, until I told the team in one of our team  meeting that we need to do something  differently, let’s do the workshop.

Application

The workshop started by sharing the team the objectives of what we want to achieve, what  problems we are trying to solve a week before the workshop date, so the team knows what to be  expected and prepare their point of view and ideas. This also allows the team to add their own  opinion of what they think should be discussed.

At the beginning of the workshop, I started by sharing the current situations, why we are here, and  encouraged everyone to share their view. Then, we try to connect the objectives, problems, with  what we think are the possible root causes, and how each objectives and problems are related,  dependent, and what can we do differently assuming there is no constraint.  It was quite difficult at  the beginning until we started to draw the pictures and wrote down whatever ideas, comments from  the team so everyone can see the same things. We couldn’t finish in the first meeting but we were  all want to continue for couples of session.

Insight & Approach

We ended up with a full picture of what are the missing parts, some new processes we need to add  on or make an improvement  which the team believe should get us to  address at least 50% of the  objectives we have set at the beginning, but that’s good enough for the long journey.

I found about using mind mapping is the great way to facilitate people to capture, develop and share  ideas visually at the same moment without worrying. People are appreciated when they see their  ideas are recognized and discussed openly even though it may not be carried on further. Pictures say  a thousand words are real. Another lesson learnt for me is to not try to achieve everything objective  in one workshop, but it prioritize and divide in to phases.

