Not-Standardized Project Management : IQTELL, Directory Opus, etc.

Posted by Fredy
Nov 2, 2011 at 01:14 PM

@ Doctorand

I thought as you think before touting outlining within my circle of friends, etc., and be sure I made sure they understood how outlining’s working, and I offered to help with any question that might arise. NOBODY was interested. So it’s NOT lack of knowledge of outliners, it’s an inherent, spontaneous aversion against them, and I suppose people might have an instinctive presentiment they’ll be confined to very close borders - when in fact, when you do outlining with “light outlines”, 50 items, 80 items, 25, 120 sometimes - there’ll be enough room to breathe even with outlines, the organizational benefits as a surplus.

So much for your arguments 1 and 2. your argument 3 doesn’t hold any better since all those mind mapping progs impose a normal hierarchy indeed, but just APPEAR to do otherwise, AND the industry leader alone’s got, from their own speaking, a 7-digit (paying) customer base - all artist types in all those big corps ? Course not. It’s just replacement of NOT-immediately-available OR immediately-available-but-cluttered-then elements by some graphical (and very well hierarchical altogether) representation of the same elements but which allows for easy browsing, your eyes wandering back and forth over a flat design where elements are spread upon a white background, calming down any unrest that might arise when getting stuck at any “problem” element : You instinctively know that you can insert other elements between, offering possible solutions / other aspects.

Whilst the indentational structure of outlines appears as compact as multiple fences, by that appearing frightening instead of supporting - and that’s why I lately try to hold my outlines short, rather flat, and as expanded as possible, hence their multiplication.

The right and the left hemisphere brain types (of which you didn’t expressly spoke, whilst implicitely making allusion to them), I’m not as convinced of the assumedly almost mutually exclusive occurence of those “thinking types” as many of us were when these ideas come into the market, in the seventies and thus, a little way back now.

If you were right upon those types, the mind mapping industry leader wouldn’t sell within the 7-digit range, and most of their business with big corporations (= even in big corps, those strategic development, etc. specialists ain’t but a handful), AND it’d be outliners (!) that would be sold in big numbers, not mind mapping progs, and mostly to those big corps, i.e. corporate types, i.e. straighforward, “logical”, “thinking-in-hierarchies” types.

Sorry for being too old as to fall into common thinking behaviour, then, but preferring just logical thinking which isn’t an antagonism to creativity, but just part of it, or the other way round, or both components being siblings within a more general element of creation. ;-)