How to effectively use XMind for project management?

Posted on December 6th, 2016 in Tips | 17 Comments »

(Watch the Tutorial)

Nowadays, projects are becoming bigger and more complex. Project manager George is
managing five major projects simultaneously. It’s two weeks before the deadline of one of them.
But the project is at least five weeks behind!

It’s hard.

George is definitely not the only one who struggles with multiple projects. Managers need better
tools to help them plan and implement projects, monitor their status, maintain control of project
budget and communicate effectively with team members and stakeholders. Luckily, XMind is
here to help.

All projects at a glance

http://www.xmind.net/blog/en/2016/12/how-to-effectively-use-xmind-for-project-
management/#more-2897
For project manager like George who is managing multiple major projects simultaneously,
project dashboard is your best choice. All projects will be displayed in one mind map, so that
you can have a clear overview of all projects without submerging yourself in the details.

Manage a project

XMind, an incredibly versatile tool for project management, suits perfectly every stage of project
management process. When managing a project, there are numerous things need to be done.
Good visualization tools like XMind help you get all needed information quickly. Simply open a
blank mind map and write down all project related information, you will get a clear overview of
your project.

http://www.xmind.net/blog/en/2016/12/how-to-effectively-use-xmind-for-project-
management/#more-2897
In XMind’s Task Info view, you can

 enter an assignee who is responsible for a task;

 select a proper priority level for a task;
 quickly set the start and end date for a task by mouse click;
 easily change the task progress by moving the progress slide;
 set check point to determine whether the project is proceeding as planned and to take
corrective action as needed;
 add a predecessor to the selected task.

Gantt chart in project management

Gantt chart is one of the easiest ways to quickly visualize a project and all its subtasks. Even for
complex projects, they can be used to provide a quick overview of the project. XMind converts
the mind map to Gantt chart effortlessly, which helps you get all related information at a glance.

http://www.xmind.net/blog/en/2016/12/how-to-effectively-use-xmind-for-project-
management/#more-2897
Simply click the “Gantt Chart” button on the toolbar you can open the Gantt chart view. In the
left part of the Gantt chart view, you can quickly add, edit or change all task information, which
will be shown as task bars in the right part. When you hover over the task bar, the detailed
information will be shown as a tooltip. You can change the start and end date by moving or
dragging the task bar and even add dependency between two tasks.

Print Gantt chart to multiple pages

To communicate information with your team or stakeholders easily and effectively, XMind
supports printing the Gantt chart on multiple pages and exporting the Gantt chart to MS Project,
PDF and image.

Presentation makes communication easy

Sometimes project managers may need to present the project, so the team members can fully
understand the project process and their responsibilities, or they just need to report on the current

http://www.xmind.net/blog/en/2016/12/how-to-effectively-use-xmind-for-project-
management/#more-2897
status of a project. XMind has a very powerful and helpful presentation feature, which helps
present from topic to topic and get focused on each particular topic with the help of the darkened
background. With slide-based presentation feature you can customize your own presentation
with just a few clicks.

Buy Now!

17 Responses

 Grant

I love the potential of this aspect of Xmind. However, we can already see above a key
functional error in the design: The ‘Summary Tasks’ (eg. Project 1) are not automatically
taking into account the dates of the underlying tasks, and so give false end dates. This
will be a problem for George when he presents a summary view to management, and they
think it will be done a week earlier than George plans! Also, I see the team is working on
the weekends. Is there a project calendar that automatically excludes hours, or days from
the planning?

 Nolan Dinsmore

http://www.xmind.net/blog/en/2016/12/how-to-effectively-use-xmind-for-project-
management/#more-2897
 I am a retired project manager and this would have made my job so much easier. It would
also be extremely useful in status updates to the clients easy to understand and accurate!
Great tool!

 rui orfão

hello
i saw the chapter “All projects at a glance” where you put a very nice resume table with
several projects.
are xmind able to read several xmind files (eache file with a Project) and list the top
priorities, progress and person of those tasks and give us an updated resume table?

kind regards

 ActsMind

台北中文版 → https://goo.gl/burMrg

 Phillip Marzella

can xmind import a spreadsheet and convert it into a mindmap?

 Anna

Hi Philip,

currently, XMind doesn’t support importing a spreadsheet. XMind supports importing

MS Word, Mindjet MindManager, FreeMind, OPML, Lighten and NovaMind.

Best regards,

Anna

 Anna

Hi Grant,

thanks so much for your feedback. Currently, the dates of the underlying tasks won’t be
taken into account automatically. We will consider your advice very carefully and try to
improve this feature in our future releases.

For now, weekends are not counted for task duration. We are also considering to give
users options to define their preferred holiday settings in our future releases.

Best regards,

http://www.xmind.net/blog/en/2016/12/how-to-effectively-use-xmind-for-project-
management/#more-2897
 Anna

 Mike

Hi,

I’m sorry, but the way XMind manages tasks today makes it almost unusable for project
management. If you manage several projects at a time, adding tasks across multiple
mindmaps, it’s absolutely impossible to have a clear view of all tasks at a glance.

What’s more, the tasks info panel if overcomplex and not actionable when managing
simple “todo” or more advanced GTD-like mechanisms, unless you want to spend/waste
a lot of time filling a form for every single task.

Make the “All projects at a glance” chapter real, by automatically listing all tasks across
multiple mindmaps and yes, perhaps XMind would have a future in projects
management. Until that, it’s just a very frustrating tool, with many powerful features but
lacking the ability to show the big picture. Which is a shame for mindmapping tool.

 Mike

As you add features, please consider adding a Critical Path Method (CPM) to indicate a
task or milestone that must be done prior to other tasks and even highlight or prioritize
those lists of tasks (the “Crtitical Path”) which are necessary to other task lists. This is
another basic way to view and present project planning that XMind might be ideal in
performing.

 Gordon

At Grant
Hello,
Project-times and -bars are handled correctly if you set the dependencies correctly.
In Project 1 there are no dependencies set FROM the underlying tasks.

As you can see in project 2, Task F can only end, if the whole Project 2 ended. This
makes little sense. By turning the dependency, all should work fine (arrow is then
pointing up from task to project).

 Richard

XMIND: As you add features, please consider adding the ability to add “network
diagram” edges/lines precedence relationships e.g. Task A must be done before Task B,
after the block diagram (logical relationship) lines are in place.

http://www.xmind.net/blog/en/2016/12/how-to-effectively-use-xmind-for-project-
management/#more-2897
  Jay

New to XMind, found this easy to use and quite useful! Def makes projects easier to
track and illustrate to my audience. One drawback is I didn’t see where I can easily and
effectively input and track my budgets and targets. Anyone knows?

 Rob

@Xmind. The thing that really damages Xmind’s usefulness is it’s inability to show dates
in English (rather than US) format in Gantt chart view. 05/06/2017 is really difficult for
me (and millions of others) to read as anything but 5th June. Surely this is an easy fix?
Thank you.

 Victor Zhang

Thanks, it’s useful to me, a junior project manager.

 @philippeko

Hi All,
Related to the section “All projects at a glance”, it’s seems to be time consuming to
update a large projects portofolio manually.
Is there a programmatic way to do it ?
Thanks for feddback,
@philippeko

 @vabrunwin

My main use for Xmind is for Product Roadmap planning (top down), and I think the
simple Gantt Chart described above will be just the job for my Use Case. I need to take a
full Roadmap for 2017 (my Mind Map) and prioritize only the items that my Delivery
Manager can resource. These can then be published to management and customers using
the Gantt Chart format. De-prioritised items will remain on the Mind Map until more
delivery resources become available.
Then we will transfer each of the items to be delivered into JIRA as Epics, where the
Scrum Master will manage the agile delivery of each story, using ‘bottom up’ planning.

 janosikos

I’m using this with some plugin – sync for outlook . now when I add new task it
synchronise with putlook (office 365 exchange) and app on my android phone
(taska&notes app) and I’m very, very glad !
Greg

http://www.xmind.net/blog/en/2016/12/how-to-effectively-use-xmind-for-project-
management/#more-2897