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Many intranet project teams take off on a race to hit the ground running and move too quickly from assignment to implementation. They never even stop to notice the trees, let alone take a step back and see the forest. As a result, many projects experience excessive overruns in time, effort, and budget, and some outright fail.

What if you had a tool that was easy to use and could help you see the forest, the trees, and in between? Enter MindManager, a visual tool for brainstorming and planning from MindJet LLC.

A project is simply an idea. Common sense dictates that the more clear your vision and understanding of that idea and its objectives, the greater your probability of achieving it. After all, if you don't know where you're going, how will you know when you get there?

Most project management applications only capture and present information in linear and Gantt-chart views, which are designed to manage scheduling, budgeting, and timelines. Imagine using a tool that steps out of this limiting capsule and allows you to brainstorm and capture project ideas more intuitively and visualize your project in a way that is more in tune with how people actually think and create.

MindManager can help you step out of the box and better visualize, plan, and communicate your projects and ideas. It is easy to use and features seamless integration. It can be used for brainstorming and planning meetings to visualize concepts (without losing details), issues, and relationships and quickly document the outcomes — no more flip charts, transcribing notes, and miscommunications.

MindManager does all this using visual maps. For example, let's say you have a meeting with multiple stakeholders to brainstorm creating an intranet for your company. In short order, you can produce the following mind map of this project. (I created this map in about 15 minutes of time with no prior experience using the tool.)

A mind map of an intranet project created using MindManager. (Click for a larger image.)

With this map, I can show as many details as I like, collapse it, or create hyperlinks to other maps, documents, and Web pages. I can also add more traditional project management fields such as durations, resource tracking, and completion status. However, I personally prefer to keep my maps clutter free and use MS Project to do the more traditional, linear project tracking. The good news is that MindManager synchronizes seamlessly with MS Project, allowing you to update information in either application while keeping the details synchronized. In less than five minutes of setting up a link with a new MS Project file, I can export the following to MS Project:

MindManager makes it easy to manage a project using Microsoft's Project.

As you can see, all the task relationships and details are maintained. I could now work seamlessly in either MS Project or MindManager to further edit the project plan and simply synchronize the two with a click of a menu item.