Genius Project (project portfolio and project management software) - encompasses every aspect of a project, big or small: project portfolio management, risk and change management, budget and cost management, demand management, document management, planning, project tracking, resource management and more.
Genius Inside is a market leader in project management solutions. After over 10 years in the market, they now have over 475 customers and 50,000 end users worldwide. Its flagship product, Genius Project, was awarded and nominated many by IBM.
Thanks to its extreme flexibility Genius Project meets the needs of an array of organizations from small business to large companies in every industry. Genius Project supports most project methodology, like Prince 2, ITIL, PMI, Six Sigma and other. To help organizations save time, Genius is delivered with Industry standards methodology templates.
Genius Project can be a on demand or Lotus Notes based. It covers all critical project management needs : portfolio with Key performance indicator, Gantt Chart, Document management, workflow, advanced resource management, risk management, reporting and multiple collaboration features.
Genius Project helps you improve each step of your projects: Project selection, Project Planning, Project Staffing, Project Execution, Project tracking and Project reporting.
Genius Inside’s customers have experienced the following results: Increased team productivity and efficiency by 50% Increased project deadline achievement by 30% Reduced costs and especially administrative costs by 70% Elimination and reduction of paper by 50% Most of them have a ROI within the first 3 month of implementation
Genius Project not only manages your projects, but also supports all your business processes. As the software is 100% web based, you can always have access your data : who, when, how, how much All information is centralized and classified with easy access and All team member stay connected and share information for better collaboration. Teams are constantly more knowledgeable, which leads to better decisions.
Genius Project has benefits for every collaborator, Project Officer, Project Manager and all project team members. Let’s have a look at each of them.
Project Office (Executives)
The Project office accomplishes different tasks throughout the cycle of the project. First he needs to select the right project to align project portfolio with business strategy. Genius Project provides a Key Performance Indicator Module to help select the best projects. Then he needs to monitor the project portfolio and coordinate the different projects together. Genius Project provides a portfolio and multi project views. He also needs to create various reports. Genius reporter combines report creation and analysis tool.
Genius KPI modules helps executives and top management select the projects that bring the most value to the organization. First of all, Genius KPI allows executives to list and define the key performance indicators.
The Genius portfolio Module allows defining the importance of each KPI against one another, using a pair wise matrix. Each manager could submit his (her) ranking.
Each executive, manager can specify how important his each project or project request for each of the key performance indicators. Have done those two step, it is now possible to get the “Business value” for each project, which represent the importance of this project or project initiative to the organization.
Combining this business value with other dimension like ROI, Risk and necessary funding, senior management can create rank charts or bubble charts in order to define priorities.
Genius Project provides a high level portfolio view of the entire project portfolio. Different views give an overlook to all project status, project variances. The information can be grouped in various programs and categories: business unit, division or department. There are a number of indicators to choose from: issue, schedule, deliverable, risk and metrics. Executives can drill down or group the information according to their needs.
The intuitive user interface allows to drill down information very easily. In the portfolio module with just a few clicks, executives have access to all key information and status regarding project, as well easy to read consolidate progress Gantt Chart.
Many of Genius Inside’s customers use advanced reporting functions to create and share complex reports. Genius Project reporting engine populates reports that can be automatically transformed into a pdf document to share it with everyone.
Any views can be exported into Excel sheet and chart. Genius Project contains a set of predefined report templates that can be extended to fit the company reporting requirements.
Genius Project provides also powerful reporting tool to create easily reports. The software is delivered with predefined reports templates.
Project Manager
The mission of the project manager is to reach the goals as agreed. He (she) could be responsible for one or more projects. For this, they will have to develop a project plan for all team members in order to reach this common objective. The project manager is like a conductor. They are also responsible for reaching the target within the defined frame: budget, time, and quality. He or she will manage human relations and arbitrate in cases of conflict. With the participation of the other team members, decisions will be made. The project manager isn’t part of the project; he is the project.
Genius Project allows project manager to create projects and define project team. Project templates can be define to support your best practices and methodology. Genius Project provides standard template based on standard methodology like for instance Prince2 or PMI. Define project name’s, codes, as well customizable classification like priorities, scopes, departments and more… Project time line and budget could be defined as well project team.
To plan your projects, project managers can use Genius Planner a Java based Gantt Charting tool or an usual planning tool like Microsoft Project.
Genius Planner is included in Genius Project and is a powerful and feature rich alternative to Microsoft Project. Very easy to use, you create plan very simple plans or very sophisticated with many dependencies. It allows you to assign resources, define whether it’s a task, step or deliverable, define and store baselines Resources and workload can be easily assigned to activities. It also provide a resource oriented Gantt chart allowing one to easily identify allocation conflict and resolve them with simple drag & drop actions.
Genius Project is the only solution that provides a complete bi-directional integration with Microsoft Project : that means that anyone can plan all projects with Microsoft Project and then synchronize them with Genius Project. Not everyone in the company has Microsoft Project installed on their desktop? No problem, Microsoft Project plan can be viewed in Genius Planner and also vice-versa. Which means that all team members have access to the information and can provide feedback.
To check the availability from the resources, various views & graphics as workload chart are available. It is very easy to see where the allocation conflicts are as well over resource allocation. Generic resources are also available in order to anticipate resource needs according to resource profiles and competencies.
Project manager can also search for the adequate resource according to various criteria. The extended resources searching engine is able to find the right resource to do the job.
After the project is planned and that the team is clear on their tasks, project managers need to follow project progress constantly. Genius Project provides many different views to see and analyze project progress: overview with visual progress indicators, task and assignment tracking view, deliverables tracking. You can also view the project as a calendar.
Genius Project provides also many views to monitor closely expenses to avoid projects going over budget. You can view the margin you will realize monthly, the cash flow needed monthly, the costs by project and step to have detailed information about the repartition of the expenses by projects and also inside the project.
To keep tracking on the time spent on each tasks Genius Project provides timesheet to be filled-out weekly by team members. The project manager can then approve or deny them and he can drill down for more details. Genius Project also provides reports based on the timesheet information to have better understanding where resource spends time.
Genius Project helps also the project manager, supporting project management processes. Simple and advance workflow can be define via the setup module. This allows project manager to organize the flow of information within the project, like for instance document review and approvals.
Team Members
The team members participate to the project accomplish the planned work, create documents and fill in their timesheets. They also report other events like issues.
Genius Project is a platform with many collaborations features to improve team performance and responsiveness. Genius Project provides personal dashboards, where resources can track their own tasks to accomplish and to follow-up. Each task is displayed with its status. There are also views with their documents, timesheet and expenses.
Genius Project provides Email automatic notification to all team members, and also external party as Genius Project integrates also external resources. Project members receive directly in their mail box, when a task is assigned to them or when a document is modified. Emails can also be integrated as a stand alone document, or related to one document. They can be integrated as questions, remark or answer, allowing the creation of a project discussion about a task, risk, etc.
Genius Project has a centralized document repository to allow all team members to have access to project documents. Documents are classified between different types and different views are available to display the documents. Team members will no longer waste time anymore searching for documents on their desktop and mailing them to each other.
Any attachment ( MS Word, Excel, Photosphop, etc.) can be added in any document and it can be updated straight into Genius Project, so that every team members has the same version. Different versions can be created of a document. Team members can also distribute the documents to all team members and resources outside the organization. Predefined workflow will help to support any document review processes. Access right could be also specify for each document.
Genius Project provides user friendly timesheets to enter the time spent on each task weekly. When entering data an individual can enter comments, detailed information on the nature of the time spent and if the task is completed. Project’s actual dates are automatically updated using timesheet data entry.
Risk management is crucial to project success. Genius Project allows team members to contribute to the risk registration for a project, identify severity of risk, analyze its impact and discuss ways to mitigate the risk.
An issue tracking system in Genius Project allows all stakeholders to report issues and keep track of pending issues in their project.
Genius Project addresses critical project management needs: planning, document management, collaboration, reporting, resources management, project budget and cost tracking in a unique, collaborative environment. Genius Project combines superior information sharing and updating capabilities with sound project planning and tracking functionality, rendering it a valuable tool for streamlined business operations.