Decomposing Tasks with Mind Maps

Many projects are delivered late—one of the key reasons being that the tasks assigned to team members are too broad or vague. You might be asking yourself “what’s wrong with broad tasks?” As I answered in my most recent post, it’s very difficult to accurately determine a timeline for large or broad tasks.

Most projects are late largely because of these broad tasks and the estimated timeline from inception to delivery is typically unrealistically short. Thus, the solution is to decompose these broad tasks into a number of smaller subtasks. It’s easier to determine how long it will take you or your team to accomplish a smaller task as opposed to a larger one.

Don’t believe me? Let’s try an experiment that everyone can relate to: moving from one home to another. Consider these two groups of questions:

1. How long will it take you to pack up all of your belongings, move them into your car, unload them into your new house, and unpack them?
2. How long will it take you to do the following:
   1. Pack up all of the dishes, silverware and cookware in the kitchen?
   2. Pack up all of the delicate China and glassware?
   3. Pack up the five-piece dining set?
   4. Move the China cabinet into the car and unload it back at the new house?

I’m not going to list every possible task that would go into packing up your belongings and moving them into a new house, but you get the idea: it’s almost impossible to give an accurate answer to the first group of questions, whereas it’s much more feasible to provide some reasonable answers for the second set. You can use the sum of all of the times required for each small task to determine how long it will take you and your team to accomplish a much larger task. And that’s what this article is all about.

The Right Tool for the Job: Mind Maps

Let’s stick with this “move out, move in” example for now. In order to efficiently decompose our two big tasks, “moving out of House A” and “moving into House B,” I’m going to use a mind map. For the sake of brevity I’m going to limit my example to just the packing portion of the move-out project.

Here’s how we get started:

We begin by considering all of the rooms in House A as separate groups of tasks, which is reflected on the mind map above. That’s just the first step. Now we need to begin thinking about each room individually. Let’s examine the master bedroom:

So we’ve subdivided the master bedroom into four subtasks, which I can then divide further:

Now we’re getting down to individual items in the master bedroom—this is progress; rather than having to estimate how long it’s going to take us to pack up the entire master bedroom in one blind guess, we now have an idea of what individual items are going to need to be packed. However, we still need another level of decomposition; each item on this list requires a certain amount of effort to be properly packed so we must take into account the steps needed to pack each item.

Now we’re going to use a mind map to break down how to pack each item, and from this next level of decomposition we can guarantee a much more accurate timeframe for the total move-out project. We’re going to start by decomposing all of the tasks that go into packing up a king-sized bed, which is arguably the most awkward thing in the house to pack.

Here we have the key components to the bed; now let’s add some specific packing tasks to each of these components:

And one more level of decomposition:

Now we have very specific tasks instead of broad ones and we can estimate very accurately how long it will take us to take apart this bed.

Next Step: Assign Some Durations to Your Specific Tasks

I exported my above mind map to outline format since it’s a bit easier to make this next point clear. Given how specific these tasks are, it becomes trivial for us to produce a very accurate timeframe for unpacking the king-sized bed in our master bedroom. Let’s assign some durations to these specific tasks based on our prior experience:

• The Mattress
  • Remove Linens
    • Remove Pillows [ < 1 minute]
    • Remove Sheets [ 2 minutes ]
    • Load into car [ 2 minutes ]
  • Remove Mattress Cover
    • Place mattress cover into car [Can be done at the same time as linens]
  • Remove Mattress from Bed Frame
    • Place in hallway for movers [4 minutes]
• Bed Frame
  • Push the bed away from the wall [2 minutes]
  • Remove Headboard
    • Unscrew from back of bed frame [6-10 minutes depending on tools available]
    • ii. Store screws and washers in toolbox [1 minute]
    • iii. Place in hallway for movers [1 minute]
  • Place in hallway for movers [3 minutes]

I’ve added durations for all of the simplest tasks and now I can simply sum those durations to determine how long it will take to pack the entire king-sized bed: 22-26 minutes, which is accurate based on my personal experience. If you repeated this exercise (it only took a few minutes) for every room in the house you would be able to build a very accurate assessment of how long it would take you to move out.

Although we used the rather common example of moving out of one house and into another, this technique can be applied to any project to help construct a much more accurate timeframe for completing a project. Next time we’ll show you how to convert this mind map into a Gantt chart to help plan the order in which tasks need to be executed.

If you want to try decomposing your own project’s tasks down into simpler ones using mind maps then you can download a free trial of SmartDraw.

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