March 16, 2007, 1:38 PM — Listen to the column Management Mashups, or visit our Podcast Center to hear more by James Gaskin.
Web 2.0 applications may be making the most noise about application mashups, but "old-fashioned" products can play that game as well. For some reason, people have been asking me about alternatives to Microsoft's Project Manager software recently. Now the company behind FastTrack Schedule 9.1, AEC Software, has juiced their own product with an interesting mashup: brainstorming software MindManager.
Too often, project meetings include noisy contributions from multiple people with divergent ideas that may or may not advance the project. Then the project manager takes his or her notes and tries to make the idea free-for-all fit into Gantt and PERT charts. The next meeting becomes noisier as those proponents of ideas that didn't fit into a neat task timeline argue again, assuming they can remember what they were passionate about in the previous meeting.
Next time, try letting the noisy and divergent members of the group fill out their own mind-map using MindManager software. The software will force them to be more organized and fill in blank spots in their ideas. Connections between ideas will become more apparent, and can even be tagged and saved. Everyone involved can peruse the mind-map report at their leisure, and try and fit their ideas into the existing project management framework.
Armed with the project mashup toolkit, the manager need only import the MindManager files into an existing FastTrack Schedule project to include ideas from everyone. Ideas that need resources and employee commitments, as they all do for implementation, can suddenly snuggle into an official project management, task-oriented framework. Flexibility inserted during brainstorming can be organized and then fit into the project management task list. Creativity may actually improve the project management process, and most project management plans need improvement.
Add in the fact that FastTrack Schedule and MindJet both work on Macintosh as well as Windows computers, and you add a second mashup to the mix. Although the stereotype for project managers is orderly to the point of being rigid, brainstorming managers tend to be looser, more creative, and more flexible. Yes, a stereotype for Macintosh users. This could be the tastiest mashup since that chocolate bar and peanut butter collision witnessed by the Reeses candy company all those years ago.
