How can You Benefit From using Mind Mapping in Your Business Planning

Many people just think of business planning as "writing business plans". Sure, business plans are important, and help you understand the direction of the company, but there are many other plans that you need to put together to keep your business on track and growing on a day to day basis. There are a number of problems with "traditional" business plans. They are difficult and boring to write, difficult to understand, and most people don't follow them. Replace them with Mind Maps and the whole scene changes. You now don't need to start at the beginning and work to the end - you can just put in branches for your ideas as you think of them. Your planning efforts are clearly based around your overall goals and objectives, so everything is on topic and focused. When you give the plans to other people (or get them to collaborate on putting them together), they can see why all the different parts fit together and why they are necessary, and how they can contribute. So let's have a look at some key places you can use Mind Mapping to make your business more productive. Mind Mapping Your Vision / Mission Statements Do you remember the vision or mission statement of the last company you worked for? Did you actually understand all the bits that made up the vision, and why they were there? If you're anything like me (and everyone else employed at all the places I worked), then you probably didn't really read or understand the vision statement, and it had no impact on what you did in the job or how you did it. In many businesses, it's like the owner or board of directors had a "planning seizure" one day and produced this document that got pinned to the wall somewhere, and has been steadfastly ignored ever since. Well that whole scene changes when the vision statement is done using Mind Maps. The visual nature of the Mind Maps means that they are noticeable, colorful and easy to understand. The linkages between the overall company goals and the specific things that the company does to implement the things that lead to achieving the goals is clear. You can see at a glance what the company is all about and how they are going to achieve the vision. When a group of people get together and create a shared vision, the first thing is to create an appropriate central image for the Mind Map - sometimes this act alone brings clarity to the vision and purpose. Each person will see how he or she fits into the overall picture and will have a better understanding of the organisational direction. The vision defined in these maps can cover the corporate strategic plan, a one year vision, or a short term project. Too often professionals spend enormous amounts of time working in isolation on their part of a vision statement or project plan while the entire team shares little communication and does not understand the direction, or buy in to it. Taking a short amount of time with the entire group to create this vision will save time, money, and frustration. Now that's something that the staff can buy in to. That's something you can use in your marketing. That's something that becomes part of the company culture. And that's what a vision statement should be! Using Mind Maps for Your Task Lists Whether planning a day, a week, a month, a year or your life, a Mind Mapped task list is a dynamic, interesting and beautiful way to get the use of your time in order. Begin by creating a new Mind Map and placing the time frame for the tasks in the centre. Next, conduct a brainstorming session. In most situations, your work will be goal focused, in which case, create branches for each overall goal for the period and then break the overall goal down into a series of smaller tasks. In the case that your tasks are more time based, you may end up putting the tasks onto a day-based planner such as the one shown here, and then put sub-branches for the tasks. Once you have this, you can create checkboxes on the branches to check off as you complete each item. You can also add priority markers so that you always know what's most important. One thing that I have heard recommended over and over again is keeping a journal of all the things you have learned from the tasks you have done and decisions you have made, so you have a permanent reference to it. I would suggest that a better way of doing your journal is that you create Mind Maps of the things you have learned and the decisions you have made. Using Mind Maps, you can easily refer back to your notes and understand the context, see what the information was, and assimilate it at a glance. And when you create a Mind Map to record the information, you cement it more securely in your brain for easy and quick recall and use in planning future tasks. Planning and Managing Goals using Mind Maps Defining, setting and working towards goals is as important for a company as an entity as it is for individuals. People, be they employers or employees, feel most fulfilled in their work when they feel they are achieving something - using a Mind Map to plot and chart goals, for the company and for individuals within the company, increases staff satisfaction and gives them direction and inspiration. They can see why the goal is necessary, how all the tasks fit together and how they fit in and can contribute. Mind Maps can even be used as an alternative to the traditional performance review documentation - allowing employees to chart their own career progress in a creative and dynamic format. The Mind Map below shows an example of this, where you can see that the major objective areas are identified clearly, and there is room for recording information relating to each of the topics as the conversation progresses. It can also be used for self assessment prior to the interview. This ensures that the review can be brief and to the point and cover all the required aspects without missing anything. Performance reviews can be based on KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that are also written up in Mind Map format. Negotiated KPIs not only give employees a sense of empowerment, they also give managers an interesting insight into the mindset of each staff member. By asking staff to set their own KPIs, you are really asking them to reveal what they think their job is, their confidence level in what they do, how motivated they are and their ambitions within the business. Have employees brainstorm KPI ideas on a Mind Map. Have them do this by placing their job title or name in the centre and then creating a parent branch for each of the responsibilities that they regularly perform. From here, they should look at each responsibility and add branches that relate how they feel they are currently performing, whether they enjoy the activity, improvements they think they could make and finally, what they believe the KPI should be for each of these activities. Your Business Plan How often have you seen business and marketing plans that people have slaved over for hours merely flicked through (if that!) by staff members, investors and sometimes even the business owner themselves? Even investors and venture capitalists who need to understand the business plans in order to make their investment decisions get thoroughly bored looking through boilerplate business plans day after day. That is no way to wow them into investing in your company. It is no way to get your staff to buy into the company direction - they can't even understand all the pages of boring text. As any good salesperson knows, you have to know everything you can about your products or services in order to persuade someone to buy them. In this discussion, you are the salesperson and your products represent your business. Your customers are potential investors and employees. Since you want your customers to believe in you, you must be able to convince them that you know what you are talking about when it comes to your business. You must be willing to roll up your sleeves and begin digging through information. Since not all information that you gather will be relevant to the development of your business plan, it will help you to know what you are looking for before you get started. In order to help you with this process, we have developed an outline of the essential elements of a good business plan. What needs to be in the plan? Every successful business plan should include something about each of the following areas, since these are what make up the essentials of a good business plan: Executive Summary Market Analysis Company Description Organization & Management Marketing & Sales Management Service or Product Line Funding Request Financials Appendix Mind Mapping your Business Plan Using Mind Maps for your business plan is an effective way to ensure the business plan actually gets used. The point of a business plan is not to reach a certain number of pages or to display the size of your vocabulary - it's to map out where your business is, where it is heading and how you're going to get there. By Mind Mapping this plan, you are forced to be concise. Mind Mapping doesn't allow for long sentences and big words - you have to think of the shortest, clearest way to express the concepts you want to communicate - try limiting yourself to one word, or dispense with words altogether and represent concepts with meaningful graphics. When setting up a new business it is useful to create a Mind Map to show what your goals and aspirations are and what things you need to think about when setting up your business. Then you need to define your business - where you define your company values, target market, levels of service etc, so you know who you are as far as the market is concerned. You will also want to create a Mind Map of the entire organizational structure for the "finished" business, including job descriptions, so you can plan ahead for the way the business will be when completed. It may well be that you put your name beside every position to start with, but as you grow, you will be able to take a main branch at a time and hand that off to someone else, and progressively move down to the leaf branches as the company grows. How to create a Mind Mapped Business Plan Place the name of your business in the centre and use a picture that you think describes it. This doesn't necessarily have to be the company logo, perhaps it is a picture of what you want to achieve via your business. Now, from the centre the parent branches will be titled: Marketing, Financial Management, Management, Service and Sales. Marketing I recommend that your 'Marketing' branch is a link to an entirely new Mind Map that focuses solely on your Marketing Plan. Financial Management For the Financial Management branch, use sub-branches to ask and answer the following questions: What is our start-up budget? What is our ongoing budget? What type of accounting system will we use? What are our sales and profit goals for the next 12 months? If you are a franchisee, will the franchisor expect you to reach and retain a certain sales level and profit margin? What financial projections will we need to include in our business plan? What kind of stock control system will we use? Management Split the Management branch into two sub-branches: 'Management Team' and 'Staff' (if staff is appropriate) and ask and answer the following questions. Management Team How does my background/ business experience help me in this business? What are my weaknesses and how can I compensate for them? Who will be on the management team and what are their duties? Are their duties clearly defined? What are their strengths / weaknesses? If operating a franchise, what type of assistance can I expect from the franchisor and will this assistance be ongoing? Staff What are our current personnel needs? What are our plans for hiring and training personnel? What salaries and holidays will we offer? If you are a franchise, are these issues covered in the management package the franchisor will provide? What benefits, if any, do we offer? Do this rapid-fire using what we call "branch storming" where you just add branches as quickly as possible and force your brain to come up with a word for each branch, so that you can capture the essence of your thoughts and feelings. Remember, this is a brainstorming exercise, so there are no wrong or silly answers. You'll go back later and expand or delete points and ideas as you need to. Service and Sales There are four keys to excellent customer service: trust, knowledge, efficiency and friendliness. On your Service branch, answer these kinds of questions: Why can our clients trust us, our products and our service? What do we know that makes our clients lives easier? How do we exhibit efficiency in our dealings with our clients? How can we ensure our clients think of us as their trusted friends? On your Sales branch, think about the process that your clients will go through to buy from you - that is from the time they walk in the store (or contact you to enquire about your product or services) to the moment they settle the final bill. How to Use the Business Plan Mind Map Mind Mapped business plans are great for presenting information to investors and franchisees, as they allow logical connections between items to become immediately clear - much better than a 60 page text document that nobody reads or understands. At the same time, the Mind Map is also presenting a one-page overview of the business. This allows people to understand the concepts you are trying to explain to them much quicker, making those funding requests and franchise sales that much easier. Using software makes the Mind Mapping process a breeze. When dealing with the specifics of the business directions, you'll find it easy to brainstorm the ideas, adding them at the appropriate place and rearranging as necessary, all at the click of a mouse. Updating the business and marketing plan becomes less of a chore when these plans are put together using NovaMind. The software makes it easy to move ideas around and add and delete ideas as necessary. You could even turn the Mind Map into a large poster that could be displayed in your offices - one of the many cool things about Mind Maps is that they are appealing to the eye and so become an asset you can be proud of showing to employees, clients and suppliers alike. Best of all - Mind Mapping makes the planning process fun! The brain is naturally attracted to the process of Mind Mapping. The colours, images and process will ensure you'll never be stuck writing boring plans that you know will never be read by (let alone be of use to) anyone else!

Strategic Plans - What's the Point?

	Strategic Plans - What's the Point?
	Some people think that just because they have created a business plan, that they have done everything required to be ready to go out there and take over the world! Not so! There are a number of things that strategic plans achieve which are distinctly different from business and project plans. A strategic plan: Serves as a framework for decision making, Is the basis for accountability to owners, investors and shareholders, Forms a basis for business and project planning, Explains the business to others (both external and internal to the business) in such a way as to involve them in the company direction, motivate them to support it, and let them know what the strategic direction is, Helps with benchmarking and performance monitoring, Is a stimulus for change in the business, and become the building block for future plans. Strategic plans are explicitly not detailed - nothing like a business plan. The strategic plan provides the foundation and framework for a business plan. Strategic plans are visionary documents and not intended in any way to be operational plans. Instead, they are conceptual, directional, and long term. While they are conceptual and visionary, they need to be concrete enough that they can be seen as realistic and attainable, so that you have something solid to hook your business and operational plans in to, and so you can actually tell when you have achieved the stated goals.

	Why use Mind Mapping for Strategic Planning?
	Every business needs a strategic plan to make sure you know where you are going. Strategic planning is all about setting the long term direction of the company - knowing what your goals, intentions and values are. Business owners and managers often get so preoccupied with the immediate issues (thinking tactically rather than strategically), that they lose sight of their ultimate objectives. Having a strategic plan doesn't guarantee your success though. Very often, even when strategic plans are prepared, they are not implemented. Sometimes the employees don't even know of their existence, let alone understand the contents, and "buy in" to the goals and spirit of the company. So what makes the difference between a plan that is useful and one that is ignored? Well, when you create a Mind Mapped plan, it is colorful, interesting, easy to understand, and hooks into the full understanding of everyone in the company, whether they are more inclined to logical linear thinking, or more creative and artistic. Mind Maps are memorable, and make a deep lasting impression - the sort that gets the ideas in your strategic plan implemented throughout the day to day operations of the company. Mind Mapped strategic plans are also the sort of thing that you can make into a poster and put up on the wall so that everyone can see it - including your clients and business associates. This in itself builds the need for you to be consistent with your stated plans. These are some very powerful reasons to use Mind Maps for your strategic plans, and as we will see, there are a lot of ways Mind Mapping helps in the generation of strategic plans too.

	Developing a Strategic Plan
	It can be very easy to be stuck in the rut of firefighting current issues, and thinking tactically or even in short term planning for immediate business goals and projects. It is therefore a good idea to get out of the office - away from the immediate pressures of tactical things, so you can put together your strategic plan. When thinking about what should go in your strategic plan, you should be thinking about a 2-4 year time period. Any longer than that seems unattainable, and the business and market environment is likely to change so much that the goals would not make sense anyway. Any shorter and you get back into tactical thinking. Here are some key points for putting together your strategic plan: It should be intended for a 2-4 year implementation timescale, It should be created by the owners and/or directors of the company, Focus on things that are important from a strategic perspective - this is not operational, tactical, business, project, or marketing planning, Get out of the office and away somewhere you can concentrate on things of strategic importance, Be realistic about the expectations, but also detached from the current business, and even critical of the way things are being done now. Look at the competition from a strategic perspective and learn from their approach. Before you start developing the strategic plan, make a Mind Map of your current status, objectives and strategies. A large part of this can be covered by a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis Mind Map. Some areas to consider when putting together your SWOT analysis are: Sales - marketing - distribution - promotion - support, Management - systems - expertise - resources, Operations - efficiency - capacity - processes, Products - services - quality - pricing - features - range - competitiveness, Finances - resources - performance, R&D - effort - direction - resources, Costs - productivity - purchasing, Systems - organization - structures. Understanding the Company Vision As a first step to developing the strategic plan, you need to have a clear vision for the company. In the context of a strategic plan, what you are looking for is something that describes the business in 3-5 years. How big will the business be? What products will you be selling? What services will you provide? What will your position be in the market? Understanding the Company Mission The second thing to be clear about is the company mission. This is a statement of what you do. It is very concrete, and states what you will make, sell or provide; whom you will provide it to; who it will affect; what the intended purpose is; what technologies you will use; what sales channels you will use; what makes you unique. Understanding the Company Values Now we get into the softer issues: What are you here for? What are you here to do and accomplish? What is the difference that you will make to your clients, suppliers, employees, shareholders, your community, the world? The Company Objectives With that background, explicitly state the business's objectives in terms of the results it needs/wants to achieve in the medium/long term. Aside from presumably indicating a necessity to achieve regular profits, objectives should relate to the expectations and requirements of all the major stakeholders, including employees, and should reflect the underlying reasons for running the business. These objectives could cover growth, profitability, technology, offerings and markets. The Strategies Well, this is a strategic plan after all, so I guess we need some strategies in here somewhere! These are the rules and guidelines by which the mission, objectives etc. may be achieved. They can cover the business as a whole including such matters as diversification, organic growth, or acquisition plans, or they can relate to primary matters in key functional areas, for example: The company's internal cash flow will fund all future growth. New products will progressively replace existing ones over the next 3 years. All assembly work will be contracted out to lower the company's break-even point. Use SWOTs to help identify possible strategies by building on strengths, resolving weaknesses, exploiting opportunities and avoiding threats. The Goals Next come the Goals. These are specific medium or long term measurable milestones towards the company's objectives, for example, to achieve sales of $3m in three years time. Goals should be quantifiable, consistent, realistic and achievable. They can relate to factors like market (sizes and shares), products, finances, profitability, utilization, efficiency. It goes without saying that the mission, objectives, values, strategies and goals must be inter-linked and consistent with each other. This is much easier said than done because many businesses which are set up with the clear objective of making their owners wealthy often lack strategies, realistic goals or concise missions. Follow Through The strategic plan should be reviewed on a regular basis - at least annually, and must be written down and communicated to everyone it impacts. More: http://namecardmy.com/2011年兔年运程 (from 1 Name Card, 1 Malaysia)

Microsoft: 'over 2 million' Windows Phone 7 licenses sold to manufacturers so far

Microsoft just dropped a few tidbits of knowledge on us regarding Windows Phone 7's performance in the marketplace so far. Here's what we've got:

• 'Early research' says 93 percent of WP7 customers are 'satisfied' and 90 percent would recommend the platform to others. We don't know details about the research, though -- number of customers polled, time frame, so on.
• Average of 100 new apps in the Marketplace per day, and over 6,500 total are available right now.
• Most importantly, "over 2 million" licenses have been sold to OEMs around the world.

What does that tell us? Well, let's get the elephant in the room out of the way: the iPhone 4 sold 3 million units in a little under a month after its launch, so Microsoft clearly has plenty of room to catch up -- but that comes as no surprise to us, analysts, or Microsoft itself. Furthermore, selling a license to an OEM isn't the same as selling a phone to a customer, since many of these manufactured devices are sitting on store shelves; it's unclear exactly how many WP7 devices are actually in users' pockets right now, but the number is certainly less than "over 2 million."

Microsoft's earnings call is tomorrow where we expect to get more detail on the platform's performance, but the company is saying today that it sees plenty of reasons to be "bullish about the foundation for long-term success" here -- and considering that they simply can't afford to fail in the mobile game, we hope they're right.