In this article, Natasha Baker reviews Project Genius. Project Genius is a web-based project management and document solution, that provides a role-based solution to fulfill all project management requirements.
Project Genius (PG) is the newest addition to Genius Inside's award-winning family of enterprise project management solutions. Project Genius is a Java-based tool, which provides a web-based scheduling and planning tool - in the form of the Gantt Chart. Genius Project provides bi-directional integration with Microsoft Project, which gives project managers to ability synchronize a Microsoft Project plan from anywhere within the project repository.
My aim was to find out if Project Genius lived up its mission, "to deliver the most intuitive project management software." In addition to their mission, Project Genius professes to:
- simplify visual planning and modification of projects
- provide the ability to assign and link tasks, and determine workload in a web based Gantt chart
- contains advanced resource management functions to aid in spotting bottlenecks, and utilization of resources
Considering these lofty claims, I was expecting Project Genius to deliver a high-caliber project management solution.
One could say that I'm an overly enthusiastic at times, since I have a tendency to get passionate about application dashboards. A dashboard can make or break an application. Just visualize, a busy project managers who have stakeholders breathing down their backs and team members requesting their attention - the last thing they need is an overly-complicated dashboard. What they need is important project information one-click away!
Project Genius delivers a simple graphical dashboard that incorporates a tabular interface for effortless access to both project and portfolio information. Small details add up - such is the case with Project Genius. One such detail is when you are working in a section of either a project or the portfolio- the tab is visually depicted as an orange, dog-eared tab.
By clicking the Plus (+) tab in the top right corner of the dashboard, project managers and easily switch between the project view and the portfolio view. (see screenshot 1 below). Within the project dashboard, creating a project is as easy as clicking the new project link, which is located on the right margin of the dashboard.