THE CHALLENGE With its rates capped by government regulators and facing a tight economy, Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc. (Con Edison) embarked upon a program to find cost savings through a deep analysis of its internal processes. Discovering all variables affecting workplace process flow would enable targeted, specific, problem-solving improvements to be quickly devised and implemented. The objective was to capture and document all these elements. Using Mindjet mapping software to create a Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) toolkit was the project management solution. All participants, from on-the-ground employees to department managers and IT engineers would interact and collaborate—producing a visual map of Con Edison’s specific process that detailed all variables and how the variables interacted. THE SOLUTION The Mindjet/ZBB toolkit facilitated discovery of how and why a specific process worked, with all touch points and elements included in a visual map: procedural tasks, administrative requirements, production processes, employee engagement. Participant knowledge, factual and intuitive, was quickly discovered, with both existing process documentation and new ideas collected. Across sections and departments, union and management, “mapping enabled the teams to literally ‘see’ their problem-solving efforts come together in real time to form actionable plans,” notes Al Homyk, General Manager of Operations Services in Con Edison’s Bronx/Westchester Electric Operations Department. THE RESULTS After Mindjet/ZBB analysis of activities representing just 15% of its total operations and maintenance budget, Con Edison realized more than $600,000 in savings; additional savings are expected to be in the millions. Beyond these tangible gains, Mindjet/ZBB mapping has also yielded high value, intangible benefits, primarily in Con Edison’s corporate culture. This approach to process analysis and evaluation engages participants throughout the organization—valuing their input, stimulating creative problem solving and motivating a proactive mindset. Employees are now empowered as stakeholders in their workplace environment, resulting in significant competitive advantage for Con Edison.

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World Wildlife Foundation Russia’s fundraising department - working alongside its supporters - is incorporating MindManager's maps and diagrams into its operations. THE CHALLENGE Since a large portion of WWF Russia’s projects are long-term and require stable financial support, systematic work with donors is crucial. For this reason, they have built a complex system of communication for liaising with supporters. It involves using various tools – sometimes in combination – such as: email marketing, telemarketing, SMS and postal marketing, loyalty events and face-to-face meetings. The channel of communication varies depending on the type of support. . For example, the communications with donors who contribute more than 900 roubles per year (individual supporters who receive reports on our projects) differs from the approach take with supporters who donate 100,000 roubles or more annually (members of the Golden Panda Club with whom communication is more personal). Being that WWF is a non-profit organization, efficient finance management is crucial. The mission of the World Wildlife Fund WWF is to stop the degradation of the planet's natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature. Its main goal is to conserve the world’s biological diversity. The WWF's first projects in Russia were initiated in 1988. Later, in 2004, the WWF became a national body of the Russian Federation. Within 20 years, the Fund successfully carried out over 300 field projects in 47 different Russian regions. The Fund now has branches in six priority ecological regions within the country:, the Barents Sea (Murmansk and Arkhangelsk), the Altai-Sayan (Krasnoyarsk), the Northern Caucasus (Krasnodar), the Kamchatka/ Bering Sea (Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy), and the Amur River Basin (Vladivostok) ecoregions. THE SOLUTION Membership Program coordinator Maria Aleshina explains: “MindManager came into our lives at the right time. We had just started introducing a series of important changes into our communication system. Over the previous six months, we incorporated and began actively developing telemarketing. As a result of speaking to our supporters over the phone, we saw a significant increase in the level of financial support we were receiving for conservation projects. So we emailed our supporters information about the project beforehand and then, followed up with a successful conversation with them over the phone. Thereafter we sent a follow-up letter through the post. We had to coordinate all of this with our electronic and paper mailing systems-- making sure everything corresponded to the donations the supporter made, not to mention recording it all in our database. We had to specify a separate internal workflow coordination system for the call-centre (including the duties of the operatives and coordinators, database integration, etc.).” As WWF Russia Fundraising Director Olga Bandalova reports: “MindManager enables us to present this information visually and create a diagram that sets out the sequence for using and combining various communication tools. This helps us to get a fuller, clearer picture and reveals weaker and less effective touchpoints. MindManager’s process description feature is particularly useful during the development phase of new systems or when introducing changes into old ones. The timely detection of problem areas or ineffective channels of communication enables us to optimise workflows promptly and guard against the inefficient use of budget funds.” “Diagrams of ongoing projects created in MindManager-maps save us time and enable us to evaluate the whole picture from all sides in a matter of minutes,” says Eva Bairamova, coordinator of WWF Russia's Earthkeeper Program.  THE RESULT Now, every new process or idea aimed at increasing the efficiency of the way we communicate with our supporters is quickly and easily integrated into our communication system and the division’s operations. Having a clear guide for cooperation between operatives and coordinators means that the organization always has a visual representation of the steps at our fingertips and can avoid dips in efficiency when training new staff. MindManager allowed WWF Russia in a short amount of time to document a new method of communication (telephony) and analyse the effectiveness of each individual channel before integrating it into the day-to-day work of the fundraising department. All of this enables us to attract more funds for WWF Russia’s conservation projects, which work to combat poaching as well as to protect forests, seas and endangered species like the Amur tiger, Amur and Persian leopard, polar bear, Atlantic walrus, European bison, snow leopard and Argali mountain sheep, among others. You can read more about WWF’s work at wwf.ru.

The development of the latest generation of Oral-B toothbrushes at Procter & Gamble demonstrates how creativity and comprehensive project management can be integrated through the use of software solution MindManager. MindManager not only provides transparency, but also generates significant time-savings during key activities that are a part of the Oral-B development process, such as the comparing of ideas put forward by the project developers with hundreds of trademark rights, and the filing of applications for new patents. The Challenge It is hard to imagine the extent to which technology underpins the design and production process for Oral-B toothbrushes. Whether manually or electronically, many hundreds of patents, registered designs, utility samples, and design models have to be registered for the devices, which form an indispensable part of daily life for customers. Dr. Jungnickel is responsible for the entire area of project management relating to manual toothbrushes, and when considering new designs or technologies, must carefully check whether they are already protected or whether they can be registered as new innovations. In a new, comprehensive project at Procter & Gamble, Jungnickel was required to deal with a very large volume of information. “There were a lot of brainstorming sessions”, explains Jungnickel, Project and IP Manager. In order to structure the many ideas generated through these sessions, and gain an overall picture of the information involved, Jungnickel decided to use MindManager, with which he was already familiar from a previous place of work. The Solution Using MindManager’s ‘map’ format, Jungnickel recorded and clearly structured all of the ideas and suggestions that had been submitted from the different development areas. He then attached remarks and additional supporting information about the individual points in various document formats, such as Word, to the relevant branches within the map. The next step was what Jungnickel calls “connecting the dots”−establishing connections and logical links between the individual map branches and their contents. “Using tools such as relationships, flags, or priority markers, this is quite easy to accomplish,” says Jungnickel. “Making sense of this in the form of continuous text would have been an impossible task, and management and other colleagues would have found it equally difficult to digest and understand”, adds the Project and IP Manager. The second major milestone of the extremely large project was the inspection of the patents, trademark rights, utility models, and design patterns relevant to the project. Using MindManager, the aim was now to create a patent landscape, through which the required information could be easily found and referenced later. With the large number of competitors in the market, as well as the enormous variety of toothbrush products available, around 1,000 patents had to be inspected. “The key goal was to only have to handle each patent document once”, explains Dr. Jungnickel. “Using MindManager, the most important points relating to this were listed within the map, and the full patent documents were then hyperlinked to the relevant branch in the map.” After all of the ideas of the Oral-B developers, as well as all relevant patent law information, had been consolidated within the central map document, Dr. Jungnickel could begin the core element of his work−idea management by comparing the ideas with patents and other important elements. This complex process was drastically simplified, thanks to MindManager’s clear format that imposed a visual structure on the mass of information and ideas. As a result, Dr. Jungnickel was quickly able to establish which ways the new product under development was different from the state-of-the-art products already available, and which patents and utility models could be filed in the form of new patents. “The many different functions within MindManager to filter views and information mean that it is a very effective tool to use for such tasks. Even highly complex maps can always be clearly viewed and edited in a focused, structured, and easily-digestible way,” explains Jungnickel. The work of the project and IP managers definitely doesn’t end there, though. As a patent manager, Jungnickel must remain consistently on the ball during all of the subsequent development, production, and testing phases. “We want consumers to like our products. We must therefore ensure that our developments are in line with market trends”, explains Jungnickel. The problem: if new Oral-B toothbrushes are tested and information about this reaches the public, no patent application is possible. Dr. Jungnickel must also work very closely with product development teams with regards to time, and was therefore delighted to discover that MindManager’s project management capabilities enabled him to maintain visibility and control of the project time line. “From my previous work with the software, I was completely unaware that MindManager could be used this effectively for project management, in the more narrow sense”, explains Jungnickel. “But organizing the timing as a project manager is just as easy as idea management with MindManager−two or three clicks and finished. This means that my maps do not just have a “content-related” dimension, but also facilitate “time-management”, enabling the triggering of patent applications. I found this so effective that I no longer use Microsoft Project or Excel for project work.” The Result From the recording and consolidation of ideas, to the development of innovative ideas, to implementation and production, Dr. Jungnickel manages his complex range of responsibilities at Procter & Gamble exclusively with MindManager. “Not only does working in this way enable me to minimize redundancies”, says the project manager, “it also makes me significantly faster and more efficient. For me, MindManager is the tool that allows me to bring together both creativity and excellent project management within a single interface.” Dr. Jungnickel’s way of working has also influenced the rest of the areas within the company. After a certain amount of initial hesitation among project administrators, who were used to using other PM tools, more and more positive feedback was given regarding MindManager’s capabilities. Dr. Jungnickel himself has his own perspective on “his” tool: “I now see the map as a structured database, in which I deposit all the information, and then at any time it can provide me with a precise overview of where we are in the project.”