Back "on topic" with analysis and design!

After yesterday's "off-topic" posting on the inspirational impact of "Where the hell is Matt?", I want to return today to something more related to the central topic of this blog - business analysis and software engineering; I listened to a podcast on the way home this evening. It was a cast from the pm411.org project management forum (http://pm411.org/2008/09/21/podcast-episode-036-mindmapping/) and the topic covered was mindmapping.

I will be honest - usually I don't like the pm411.org cast series; I find them slow moving and limited in content. This week's cast was no exception, but it was interesting in that it got me thinking about how I used to use mindmaps to structure different levels of interrelated information:

Used right, the multi-dimensional representation of information in a mindmap allows you to build an entire requirements document. You start with an informal capturing exercise, relating the information as it comes from the stakeholders. With the right tools you can label and map in the stakeholders too (it is just a question of labeling the lines or nodes with the appropriate tags).

I used to use visio, but that got a little too much like hard work so I moved to mindmanager (which is actually discussed in the podcast). The more you add to it the richer the network becomes. With more advanced tools I am guessing that the structure of the data can then be extracted and used in (for example) specification documentation.

A colleague introduced me to www.mindmeister.com recently. It is free to use and has some nice import/export functions as well as integration with various browsers and other applications (though I haven't played around with them yet). I have been using it for holiday planning, but it is more than sufficient to handle more complex maps!

It occurs to me now that I have probably missed an opportunity to use this simple technique - believe me, I know this sounds trivial, but I guess I am getting rusty and have forgotten some of the basics! - to identify dimensions and structures in interrelated information sets and then to build off of them throughout a project - it is easy to want to jump into more structured requirements hierarchies, flowcharts, sequence diagrams and domain modeling activities.

I am going to try it out again in the next project initiation phase I am involved in to see how much it really adds to the more formal deliverables.