What is Mural
Mural an online tool that’s used to enable teams to collaborate visually and innovatively by offering solutions to overcome their challenges. It enables team members to share their ideas visually and virtually which leads to more efficient communication and collaboration. It’s a collaborative space where teams can organize their ideas in different ways such as lists, flowcharts, frameworks, and drawings.
Here are some of the features that Mural offers:
- Sticky notes: Helps sharing ideas and feedback for further actions.
- Shapes & connectors: Help create diagrams to illustrate complicated workflows
- Icons: Helps search for icons to create a visual story
- Frameworks: Organizes content and ideas to provide structured insights
- Images & GIFs: You can use visuals to improve collaboration in a session
- Drawing: Increase creativity by using freehand sketching and writing
“Communicate visually using sticky notes, flowcharts and mapping, drawings, and so much more. Then keep collaborators productive and engaged with voting, timer, and celebration features.”
How to use Mural
Mural is a place where you can map all kinds of content, like a giant canvas that can be customized however you desire, as it has many features, learning how to benefit from all of these features is crucial. Multiple resources give guidelines and information on how to use Mural as follows:
- YouTube tutorial videos: It’s a collection of videos that help users to get started with the tool, these tutorials give insights from the basics of using the software to how you can design your thinking sessions or workshops on the platform.
- Templates: Mural’s website has a library consists of 100+ templates to help you start your next collaboration session.
- Facilitating in Mural: If you’re interested in a specific topic or finding a particular piece of information about Mural, Facilitating in Mural is the place to go, as it offers a variety of resources to help users.
- Mural webinars: As an external source that provides support on how to use Mural, UniversityWebinars.org has numerous tutorial videos and webinars that give the latest insights about the tool, as it’s constantly updated.
- IBM guide: Another external source of information about the tool is IBM, as it has a resource that offers helpful hints and tips about implementing the tool during virtual meetings, workshops, or sessions.
Why use Mural
Mural is a digital workspace intended for visual collaboration in teams, it provides a space to simplify complex challenges visually, and organize different processes on any device. Besides its many distinctive features explained above, Mural has a lot more to offer:
- Solving problems: The tool offers the possibility to collaborate visually within teams, so the speed and the ease of use of the tool make it effective in solving crucial problems.
- Visualizing ideas: By simply creating notes, flowcharts, diagrams, frameworks, and drawings to visualize the information and making it easy to grasp.
- More control: Through a wide set of tools within Mural, you can have full control over the meeting, workshop, or session.
- Spend less time: By choosing the right template and modify on it according to your needs would save a lot of time creating it from scratch.
- Always on schedule: You can set timers during your session in Mural to always stay on schedule.
- Content always saved: All the content that you create in Mural is automatically saved when it’s created.
How to integrate Mural and Obeya
Obeya (as part of Lean) offers a space to brainstorm ideas, plan, and structure work. If Digital Obeya Rooms are integrated with the tools that Mural offers, significant results can be achieved, as both sides have a lot to present which contributes to the progress of a project or an organization. Obeya helps identify problems and adjust the plan accordingly, with the right set of tools that Mural offers this process can be done more effectively. Here are some of the main accomplishments for integrating Mural and Obeya:
- Deliver value: Through displaying the activities that are planned to uncover the value in the clearest way possible.
- Drive performance: It happens when all team members are on the same page in terms of understanding different processes.
- Solve problems: Through Obeya’s structured problem-solving method, and the set of tools that Mural offers, problem-solving can be achieved effectively.
Both sides have a lot to offer, and if integrated within a project or an organization, they can drive significant results.
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