We started out using Mind Manager to organise thoughts and to hash out the beginning steps of most design, where the form is not yet 'set' and you need a dynamic area. Basically it replaced our whiteboard using a projector and Mind Manager itself.

As a consequence of this is we used Mind Manger to document our designs. A natural step was to import the requirements and link to that directly rather than referring to the document continually. The ability to display all flagged elements using Power Markers made it almost impossible for us to do without.

The ability to set tasks then made us think that we could use Mind Manager to manage development. The Mind2Chart just made that perfect.

We never started intending to use the tool to manage development, but in less than one month we have let Mind Manager into just about every aspect of our development process. In doing so, it has increased our productivity to such a level that we are not sure we ever want to do without it.

Does it do the job? Absolutely, and extremely well too.

Is it worth the cost? Almost certainly. We have saved the cost easily in one month, although that does not include my own time learning its use (although I did that for fun in my own time anyway, I enjoyed it so much).

What else can we do with it? Here I am going to list the other activities we have started looking at as part of the software development process:

More uses for Mind Manager in Software Development

We shall report on these as we cover them, should they prove to be beneficial.

Some other possible uses for Mind Manager

There are a huge number of other uses and potential uses. One we have found amazing is the ability to build this very web site. I did this myself in just three days, with not a single line of HTML or script, content taken from Word and the existing site.

Others can be seen on our map, although I am sure this is merely a small subset: