Resource Inheritance Rules

Users do not have to assign resources to each topic/task when planning to implement projects in MindManager.

When set to Central topic, the resource Smith may mean that Smith is a Project Leader.

Resources set to Main Topics may reflect subprojects managers.

Only resources set to the end task topics define who is assigned to do this task.

Also, when an employee is responsible for several tasks, the user groups these tasks into one branch. Setting the branch's parent topic to the person responsible for the whole branch makes the map more readable.

However, it may be hard to determine who is responsible for those tasks when the data from such maps are collected.

MultiMaps provides an Inherit resources option to address this limitation. Users can use this option to collect data.

If the user enables this option for all collected tasks, the Data Collection Engine will look upward from the topic branch until it finds the root resource. Once it finds a parent topic with this resource, that resource will be assigned and copied to the collected topic. The data collection engine inherits the resource from the topic’s parent topic. MultiMaps places an asterisk (*) before the resource name when this happens.

Consider the following example:

We assigned Resources to tasks (Task 2, Task 4 and Task 6) and other topics (not tasks).

If we collect tasks with resource inheritance turned off, we may see something like this:

Here, Multimaps has gathered the Tasks with resources explicitly assigned to them and tasks that do not have resources. However, when we collect data with resource inheritance turned on, we see the following:

Task 1 inherited the resource (Ross) from the Central Topic.

Task 2 had an assigned resource (Ramirez) and inherited the resource from the Central Topic.

Task 3 had no assigned resources, but inherited resources from the Central Topic and from the branch's Main topic (Morris).

Task 4 had an assigned resource (Jenkins) and inherited resources from the Central Topic and from the branch's Main topic (Morris).

Task 5 had no assigned resources, but inherited resources from the Central topic and from the Payment gateways topic.

Task 6 had an assigned resource (Smith) and inherited resources from the Central topic and from the Payment gateways topic.

Multimaps adds an asterisk symbol (*) before the names of Inherited resources to show that Multimaps has inherited the resource. Note that Multimaps will not send this to the original topic because Multimaps only use them to contextualize the gathered topics.