The power of the visuals and its application in project management tools: Alejandro Pérez
We are happy to share a guest post by our friend Alejandro Pérez.
Today I am writing this post about the power of the visuals and its application in project management tools and techniques such as Sketchnoting, Kanban or Lego Serious Play.
As the popular proverb says: "A picture is worth a thousand words", we are receiving up to 80% of the information that we process by our visual senses. Knowing the power of the visual in our daily lives, it makes sense to apply it in our project management tasks.
If you are studying for the PMP (Project Management Professional) certification you probably know how important is to have supporting mindmaps or visual diagrams to help you to remember all the important subjects.
One technique that is gaining strength today is the Sketchnoting as J.Pampliega Carlos explains in his blog:
Sketchnoting conceptualize information and ideas (of a presentation, lecture, workshop, meeting, etc.) through visual notes.
To create these notes we use metaphors to conceptualize information. Visual metaphors express ideas through symbolic images. These images are composed of forms, words and simple drawings, which help fix concepts in our memory and to recall them later easily.
While creating these notes we use different parts of our brain, including its most creative part and normally would not use to listen to a lecture, or during an analytical process. In this way, in the process of creating visual notes, a greater number of neural connections that help set longer in our memory concepts are established.
For those who like to be trendy and follow trends, the famous brand of "notebooks" Moleskine has released a special edition SketchNoting with everything necessary for this, can be found here.
I also want to recommend the book from Mike Rohde: The Sketchnote Handbook to expand your knowledge on the subject and learn sketchnoting techniques. You can purchase it at Amazon.
And it is not only visual techniques that we are talking about, also visual Agile project management methodologies like Kanban and its visual boards that help us to make a management based on visual inputs, there are a lot of different Kanban tools for visually manage projects.
Finally another tool of visual creativity that is catching a lot of force lately is the methodology Lego Serious Play that consists in the use of LEGO pieces chosen specifically for this methodology with that each person builds three-dimensional models responding to specific questions facilitator.
These models serve as a basis for the exchange of ideas within the group and helps generate knowledge and this is retained for much longer.
So far this week's article, I hope you liked what you have read and you can use it on your daily work.
