Gary Slinger » 2005 » December

“Taskforce” Meeting Template December 8, 2005

To me, a “Taskforce” meeting is one where a variety of folks are called together, and told to “fix that problem”, whatever that particular problem may be. I’ve just been asked to form such a group, to address an application performance issue at work, and in setting up the meeting, I brought together a number of my current notes and templates into a single MindManager template, for re-use. Thought I’d post it here - if you find it useful, have any comments, or want a copy of the template file itself, just let me know.

When I hold the meeting tomorrow, I’ll give out copies of the map, with the “Notes/Thoughts” section collapsed, but everything else expanded, for the participants reference. The “Notes/Thoughts” section is for me, as the meeting lead, to remind me of “discussion methods” that can be useful for these kind of things - simple brainstorming, the Six Thinking Hats, and SCAMPER.

During the meeting, I’ll make notes on the whiteboard, on my copy of the agenda, and on regular paper as I see fit. As it’ll be a fairly interactive meeting, I’m not going to try and take digital notes, either in OneNote or straight into MindManager, as I might under other circumstances; instead I’ll update everything into the MindManager map as appropriate after the meeting, and then send out both the map itself, and a Word document generated from it, for participants reference.

technorati tags: Process, MindManager, Meetings

Update: I realised that although I can’t use the MindManager web embed option, I can load the file up to Wordpress for those of you that have MindManager itself, and want the file. I’ve got no way of tracking that, so if you take it and like it, or have any other comments, do please let me know in the comments section. Thanks.

Update 2: Well, apparently not. It worked in testing yesterday, but Wordpress.com won’t allow me to upload a “.mmap” file now. I don’t know if that is a deliberate change, or a temporary thing. I’ll check again later. So, the original still applies - if you want the file, just let me know.

Final Update: Kai reminds me in the comments below that I was going to embed the Mindmap using the MindJet viewer plugin once I had things up and running on this new site. Well, I’ve been trying… I can embed the map, and it works perfectly - that really is a good plugin. Displays great in IE as well. Trouble is, it completely destroys the page layout for every post below it in Firefox - completely removes the formatting and such that is applied through the theme here. Now, someday/somewhen, I’ll spend a bit more time understanding the inner workings of what’s going on here, and I’m sure I can work around it, but in the meantime, I want to focus on producing content for the site, rather than dealing with the mechanics of it. So, old school approach:

Click here to download the “Taskforce Template MindMap” (Requires MindJet MindManager, or their free viewer).