MindManager is a mind mapping and project management tool that aims to boost users’ productivity. It is designed to facilitate a wide range of project types, and includes cross-platform functionality and 3rd party integrations.
$105
per year
Projector PSA
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
Projector's cloud-based Professional Services Automation (PSA) software helps project-based services organizations track time and expenses, invoice clients, schedule resources, and manage projects. Its three modules span a more comprehensive set of uses than typical project management software. The Accounting module helps the user track time and expenses and manage invoices and billing. Also it syncs with the company's accounting systems as a sub-ledger. The Resource Scheduling module matches…
MindManager is great in big change projects where a lot of meetings and decisions are being made over time. In that scenario there are likely a lot of other apps supporting dev, testing, etc. But MM is still more like Six Sigma than anything else in the market and there are still a lot of big companies with SS-like cultures where a strong core tool gets more buy-in. I think it's less valuable for shorter term projects.
We think Projector PSA is a great tool to track and manage people in a professional service environment like management consulting. This system is easy to set up, easy to understand and should easily suit the needs of smaller and medium sized firms. It may be less appropriate for firms that rely very heavily on project management through another system (like MS Project) or firms that rely very heavily on a sales pipeline tracking system. While still very much possible to use, you would (I believe) have to do some re-keying between systems
Projector is a very well designed tool for project management. It has allowed us to eliminate a number of auxiliary tools for project timelines and WBS for the vast majority of our projects.
Time and expense entry is intuitive and quick for our staff.
Our forecasting and resource management capability has improved greatly with Projector and allows us to grow our team efficiently with minimal additional administrative burden.
Reporting is extremely robust. It does require some time to really get a handle on the full functionality of the reporting tool, but once you do, you can get almost any kind of report you want out of the system!
Release management process needs to be improved. Currently no facility is provided to test the impact of new releases in a sand-box. This introduces business risk if there are interfaces into Projector PSA as part of it's use in the business.
I feel the main issues of the old Mindjet seem to be gone with the Corel purchase. With the huge advance of sharing via browser HTML even 1 user can affect many. And, actually, using MM kind of forced my rigid brain to rethink how I categorize and classify information/projects.
The idea of paying $69USD for an annual cost is more than fair and a great model for Corel/Mindjet to keep rolling out improvements!
We have been using this tool for a year now and find our use of it continually evolves and broadens. We are also very excited about the overhaul that's under way and feel many of the improvements being put in place will help make us that much more effective and efficient. The Projector team is also very responsive and collaborative in terms of user feedback and improvement suggestions, which helps us know they will work hard to help us get what we need out of the tool.
MindManager is very intuitive. The user interface is not cluttered and the ribbon icons are easy to understand. Several excellent "how-to" videos are available on the MindManager site as well as on YouTube. MindManager starts quickly and the user interface is very responsive. Launching other programs from MindManager such as Excel is very fast and issue free. The browsing feature is lightning fast. The drag-and-drop capability is also very fast and reliable.
The application is quick and responsive. We are able to produce mindmaps and reports with ease. The program is not complicated at all and integrates well with software and programs like Microsoft Outlook and Teams, which we truly appreciate.
I have called technical support a few times. During the COVID Crisis, I called a few times repeatedly due to a rush request. The technical support guy called me back in minutes. He somehow knew that I had called repeatedly and wanted to make sure my issue was resolved immediately
The videos are not well categorized...I had to do a bit of digging to get what I wanted and many videos on older versions. If Mindjet was to improve the titles used that would help.
Both are equally good. Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is used to get the models in a more technical format in comparison to the MindManager. MindManager is easier to use in comparison to Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect. MindManager makes collaboration easy and can be understood by a layman and does not need to have specific software training.
We did pursue Quick Arrow another tool that was similar. We found that be in inflexible in use. Projector allows a lot of flexibility in setup. Our organization has very specific business processes and we were able to set up Projector to work with those processes. Several other systems we tried were not as flexible in allowing set up to our needs.
When scope planning before I was introduced to this tool, I needed to make one master Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) for the entire project and move on. With MindMapper, I typically generate about 20 WBS-like charts throughout the project, which encouraged conversation with staff members. The major key in such ease of use has been some well thought out and very intuitive keystroke planning that allows me to keep up with the free flow of ideas.
This software's cross-functional capability allowed 10 engineers to create their projects directly within their own environment without use of a virtual machine.
Even in the small time that I stayed to see Projector PSA reporting I saw ROI projections become more realistic. There was real data to analyze that proved we were spending way too much and charging way too less on some projects.
Although employees were not used at entering their hours, this single reporting improved operations management and validated employees concerns that more people were needed to manage workload
Project proposals were more realistic because they were driven by real data.
Decision making overall for the department became more efficient and effective
