It's a faster process. Time comes at a premium. A lot of what I do is less long-term project planning, and much more a subset of longer-term projects and a lot of very fluid, short-term tasks to be accomplished with medium-term goals. It's a lot more like a series of sprints and a couple of longer-term races. The choices I have are that I can put it on a whiteboard, I can put it on a pad of paper, or I can put it on Post-it notes. In some cases, it works keeping track of that stuff that way. But I end up crossing things off, moving them to another pad or another page, and rewriting the things that are still open, to make things clearer in my head. Whereas if I'm using Lucidspark, I can keep all that stuff there. I can reprioritize. Nothing is permanent like it is when crossing something out. I can take a group of tasks, I can move them up, I can group them and highlight them, as the things that I have to do today. It's just much more fluid.
I can't tell you that I've taken a large energy project from beginning to end on one of the Lucid products, but I've used those in conjunction with such projects. In the past, when I was doing development work for energy projects, there were areas where you had to worry about certain things such as procuring land, getting the right permits, doing public and government relations. Within those, there are always a garden-variety of tasks, plus a lot of things that are unique to the project. A lot of times, I've used Lucid products to put together those thoughts, get them in one place.
The alternative that a lot of people use are bullet-points or checklists. Those make it hard to visualize things. If I'm working in Word or in Excel, and I'm typing in entries or things that I'm thinking about, they're in a line and I've got to go through three or four or five keystrokes to move a line to a different place, to reorder them. On the other hand, if I'm working in Lucidspark, I can keep generating items. I can mind-map them out. I can move something up, highlight it and move it up to a different place. I love the fact that the connections automatically move around. There's a freedom to the way that it allows structuring of your diagrams that makes it a lot easier.
Lucidspark is very powerful and it's far more intuitive. It's not clunky. I confess, I love it. I played around with it and the Templates library is very robust compared to a lot of other platforms. Other solutions do things that look funky and colorful and they give you options to change the color, but not much more. That's not what I really need. I really am trying to use this for work and so far I've been very successful.
The package of the two apps together, Lucidchart and Lucidspark, completely covers the waterfront. It's a great platform. I use Lucidchart all the time. I'm starting to use Lucidspark regularly, and the fact of the matter is that the output looks great. One of the things that I found and that I really hated regarding a number of these mapping apps is that they looked great on the screen, but when you printed them out they never quite looked like what you wanted. I've had really good luck with the output coming out of Lucidspark. A lot of times I'm reducing it to a PDF and emailing it around.
I love the SVG with the transparent background format. You just take one of those things, drop it into a document, scale it and it works, especially when I'm doing presentations to investment committees.
The combination of Lucidchart and Lucidspark in helping to visualize each step of the process from brainstorming initial ideas to turning those ideas into reality is absolutely fantastic. There's something to be said for the expression, "A picture is worth a thousand words." If you can reduce what you're doing into a picture, people will have a tendency to understand it better, and it's more concise. If you can reduce your thought process into a format where you can rearrange it freely and easily in real time, without a lot of interruption from having to use five keystrokes, the chances of your being able to get your thoughts down on paper quickly, and move them around and move them a different way, and move them again, and come to a coherent thought process and solution, are a lot better. It's a great tool.
One of the things that I had trouble with, and it may be due to the fact that we're a Microsoft Teams environment, and it may be that I just have not been able to get the permissions to integrate my versions of the apps with Lucidspark because of the security measures, but I have not been as successful in integrating my desktop apps with Lucidspark and Lucidchart, which is something I would like to be able to do better.
There is an emphasis on Google as a set of cloud apps and cloud storage but I don't use Google so that doesn't really help. We're a Microsoft shop so we've got a lot of OneDrive. We have been using Box, which I don't like and which we're moving away from, but my legacy storage asset was Dropbox. Some flexibility there would be worthwhile.
I was looking at the Kanban Board template and it's great. You bring it in, the grid is set up, and then you can add sticky notes. I would like to be able to lock the structure in place so that I could just move sticky notes. Maybe that's just something that I haven't figured out yet, but that would be amazing.
I've used Lucidspark since it came out. I've used the free version. I wanted to test-drive it to see what it was like.
Since they integrate together, I wish they offered a special deal for people who subscribed to both Lucidchart and Lucidspark.
By way of background I have, as a general matter, looked at a number of mind-mapping and project management software platforms. I've actually been really keen on trying to go from just white-boarding to something a little more tangible. My background is as a lawyer, but I worked in the energy space and spent time in tech as well. I did a lot of Agile project management and Kanbans, trying to manage project tracking and ideation related to strategic planning and the like.
I started out years ago with MindManager. They have, perhaps, the worst support for Macs. I tried to stick with that for a little bit. Not only did they provide terrible support, but it was also a question of how clunky the interface and the whole environment was. I've done a variety of work in conjunction with projects where I've used Redbooth, LeanKit, Project Plan, and Pivotal Tracker for Agile project management. Those are okay.
But between the ability to diagram in Lucidchart, white-boarding or mind mapping, like Lucidspark and, somewhere in between there is the realm of project planning and being able to move things around, I feel that the industry has been all over the place. I don't think there has been a particularly good solution in the past. Some have done some of these things well, and they work for a limited purpose, but I'm idealistic and I've been looking for the Holy Grail in this area. I've worked with a lot of these and I haven't really stuck with any of them.
On the diagramming side I used to use Visio. I discovered over time, after going through Visio and OmniGraffle, that when I started to use Lucidchart it was vastly superior. It is just so much more intuitive, so much more smooth. It works, it doesn't crash. It's just perfect.
Enter Lucidspark which was trying to break into that somewhat related field, which is the mind mapping. As I said, I've used MindManager. I've used SimpleMind. I've test-driven some of the other stuff out there but Lucidspark brings together all of the ability to customize mind-maps and diagrams that you used to get in MindManager, and more, and that you don't get in a lot of the other apps that are out there.
For a team, Lucidspark makes a lot of sense. For a while we used LeanKit. I was working on a tech startup and we were doing long-term product planning and we had a fairly intricate project-steps chart with swim lanes. I spent a huge amount of time setting it up. It was great when it was there, but I ended being the only one who was keeping it current and it was just too much. It was really too much work to set up. Simple and intuitive and powerful, Lucidspark is fantastic; it has really hit on something.
Lucidchart solves the Visio problem in a really elegant way. And Lucidspark really solves the mapping question very quickly. You can do pretty much all of your project planning very cleanly in that context.
I am not a fan of these very clunky, entry-type project planners like JIRA and Atlassian. You ended up having to have someone who manages the platform and does the entries. I just don't think people want to be constantly updating their entries. It's just too much. It takes on a life of its own. Having done traditional project planning in the context of energy projects, and Agile in the context of tech, there are times and places for each, but there are pitfalls. One of the problems is just trying to keep a team organized in a more fluid environment, where there aren't very long lead times and very discreet, concrete steps. Lucid is a fantastic tool.
One of the things that was very valuable about MindManager, although it was very clunky, was the maps library. Lucidspark has done an incredibly good job of providing a very robust library of templates. I'd like to see more of those. But right now there are many more useful templates than anything I've seen with any other similar apps. Hats off to Lucid for that. That's fantastic. I love that.
I have been chasing this Holy Grail; I love the idea of mind-mapping and I've always been an early adopter trying these things. I like this whole area. It's a bit of a hobby. I really have wanted to find that, and to find some way to be more efficient in that process and to deal not only with immediate tasks, but also ideas. How do you break it down?
One of the big problems with planning is how do you go from A to B. You've got to break it down into tasks, then you've got to break it down into subtasks and get more and more granular. It's hard to do that. You can't do that on paper easily. It's very hard and messy. You're always writing and rewriting and breaking it down more. Using an app like Lucidspark makes it really easy to do.
The idea has been out there, but no one has really done it in a reasonable way. MindManager had a great project 20 years ago and, although I don't really know how successful they've been at this point, they rolled it out to a lot of big companies. But they stopped at a certain point. They focused on the PC world and the result was that they really left the idea in an analog state, and they never brought it meaningfully into the Mac world or into a fully digital, really useful configuration. And that's been the gap.
There have been a lot of other products where people have tried to solve some of the aspects of this, but I honestly think that Lucidspark has got something pretty amazing. I feel like they've been in my head, seeing the same things that I have, but that they've actually gone ahead and they've fixed these things. These are the things that prevented me from continuing to be a customer of these other companies and apps.
I don't have a good sense of how many people really have the desire to jump into this sort of thing, unless it's imposed by their company. I've tried to implement some solutions in the past and there's inevitably a certain degree of resistance. You don't always have tech-savvy people, and that's an issue. But my understanding is that if I had someone else who had a free account, I could share a link to a board that I had done and they could see it. I might not be able to collaborate in real-time, but I believe that I could provide them with a link that's evergreen, by publishing it. Presumably there are certain things that can be done without having that collaboration feature as part of your membership. I think there's certain limited functionality where you can do some collaboration, it's just not as smooth.
