Have You Mind Mapped?

As a Business Analyst, I love mind mapping my brain storming sessions with clients. I owe introduction to this tool to one of my ex-manager, who told me that mind mapping is one such technique where you can easily capture customer's requirement on the top of that a bird's eye view of the solution can also be viewed.

Sample this- you are in a client session brainstorming over the requirements, where client is just telling you randomly about his needs. Although as a BA you might be able to connect dots with those random requirements, but problem is once you are done with the traditional notepad approach and settle down to draw a flow you will land up missing some crucial joints.

Thus why not use mind mapping techniques in the very first place itself? Personally I use Freemind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) for mind mapping the requirement elicitation process. But if you are not that environment friendly then use of stickies is possible as well to note points and then define a flow out of it in later stages.

Thus few reasons why I use Mind mapping (through Freemind software)

• Its handy- no need of pen and paper
• Effective tool to generate ideas as well within short span of time
• Effective way to let your client know that how you have drawn a picture out of his requirements
• Easy to maintain (paper might get lost, crumpled ;) etc etc )

But one important thing, newbies might think that is mind map a deliverable? then the answer is NO. its just a tool to assist you, that's it.
Depending on the scenario I would love to share my mind map with client just to tell him that what has been captured.

Bottom line- brainstorming sessions are very critical, and if it goes wrong ,then complete requirement elicitation process might go for a toss so as a BA one must ensure that no information is missed during this process.

Let me know if you have any suggestions for capturing the idea apart from mind maps?