XMind Mind Mapping

Using XMind Mind Maps PM

I use XMind for lots of business and personal purposes. Here are some examples.

• Project Planning: I use XMind to map out the early ideas of the project. A lot of my project work done at the “fuzzy front-end” — helping organizations take an idea for a project and refine it to the point that some meaningful planning can be done. XMind serves me very well for that. It lets me capture ideas, re-order those ideas easily, and format the results for an easy-to-understand image of the outcome.

• WBS: A mind map is a natural tool for building, sharing, and maintaining a Project Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). A WBS is hierarchical, as is a mind map. Mind maps a very malleable and easy to update. A WBS is very fluid during the initial planning, and still must be updated and changed (with proper change control and configuration management!) during your project. This malleability makes that work much easier.

• Business Process Documentation: I write a fair number of business process docs. I use a TWiki repository for those. For many of these, I include process flow charts. I have found XMind an excellent tool for this. (Tip: use “floating topics” tied together by “relationships” to design the basic flow. Then, you can add details under each process block, if needed, using basic mind-map sub-topics.)

• Writing and Planning: I do a fair amount of writing, and I do a fair amount of planning from scratch. I have to pull together lots of ideas, then organize them. Mind mapping allows me the quick flexibility to capture ideas and organize them. Sometimes that results in a better written article or process doc. Sometimes it results in a plan that I present to a team. Whatever it is, I get it done more easily with mind mapping.

Choose XMind Pro

After using various tools, I settled on XMind Pro for my mind mapping.

• Wide range of map types
• Full cross-platform: Teams can share maps even if they’re on different desktop platforms: Linux, Mac, Windows.
• Clean, presentable maps. (Sometimes you just use the map to organize ideas that you then present in another medium like a slide deck or a document. But sometimes you want to use the map image itself to communicate.)
• Awesome map drill down features to let you focus in on only certain ideas or branches.

You can try it out for free, but I think that you’ll like it well enough to just get the Pro version right off the bat. You can buy XMind straight from here. Click the “Buy Now” button this page.