White Papers

Process-Driven PPM

From R&D to Customer Service, effectively serving the Value Chain is an integral part of an organization's success when bringing new products to market. The fact is, many organizations run their New Product Development (NPD) projects in siloed environments not taking into account all of the elements that can impact a product’s success. NPD projects do not only live in the world of marketing and engineering. NPD projects in many cases need to incorporate the strategic objectives of executives, the demand of customers and the bottom line of operations and finance in order to realize their success.

With this reality, a sound Project and Portfolio Management strategy is needed to consolidate all of the business processes that drive the business. This is especially true with NPD projects that impact all facets of the businesses they serve.

Managing the Project Document

During the life cycle of a typical project, a project manager can produce up to fifty different types of documents to facilitate the planning, tracking and reporting of the project. Documents range from feasibility studies, resource plans, financial plans and project plans, to supplier contracts, post-implementation reviews, change request forms and project status reports. The fact is, the manner in which project documents are managed by project leaders can either be the driving force behind a project’s success or be the bottleneck that often places a project in despair resulting in its failure to meet its time line, budget and scope.

In this paper, I will be discussing the power behind an effective document management strategy for project managers and its pragmatic impact on improving your visibility into a project’s status to better respond to the inevitable reality of change occurring in your day to day work.

Genius Project Embraces IT Governance

Delivering projects that enable business growth and aligning IT strategies to business goals are key priorities for CIOs today. The goal of this white paper is to show you why Genius Project can help you achieve IT Governance.

According to the 2006 Gartner Magic Quadrant report, IT managers and CIO’s are continuing to place a high priority on delivering projects for business growth that are well aligned with their organization's business strategies. This puts project and portfolio management (PPM) solutions high on their list of business imperatives. Specifically, this white paper focuses on IT Governance and how our Genius Project Solution not only embraces the constructs of IT Governance but actually delivers out-of-the-box features and functions that provide a delivery platform to achieve IT Governance holistically.

Information: The Key to Project Management Success

Never has the concept of lean management been more important than in this difficult economic climate. Fewer resources, tighter budgets and shorter lead times mean that Project Management becomes ever more critical and the decision-making process becomes even more demanding.

Confronting the Software-as-a-Service vs On-Premise Dilemma

Many organizations frequently grapple with the dilemma of choosing a SaaS over an on-premise PPM solution. Part of the challenge is the often mixing of cloud technology and its business models presented in the marketplace.

This white paper will help organizations differentiate the various business model and benefits offered up by cloud technology. Furthermore, it will detail the possibilities cloud technology can offer your project-centric environment regardless where you deploy your new cloud-based PPM solution.

Top 10 Must-Have Reports for Project Managers

One of the primary goals project managers need to accomplish in their daily work is to deliver the necessary status reports to their stakeholders along with providing themselves with the mission-critical data that will impact their performance and the ultimate delivery of their projects. Although the culture of reporting will vary from organization to organization, there are some fundamental project details any effective project leader needs to share and consult to help drive his or her decision making process. Keeping a project on track is never an easy process and good project managers understand that they need to constantly ask the questions concerning workload, costs, timeline and overall progress. Each project stakeholder (including the project leader), will need to have answers to these emerging questions in a timely fashion in order to address inevitable bottlenecks and to deliver what was promised to their end customer.

Best practices in Enterprise Project Management

For project-centric organizations looking to incorporate an EPM strategy in their practice, it is recommended to adopt a top down approach in which the organization as a whole is plugged into the improved ways of tracking, accessing and sharing project information. Enterprise Project Management takes a holistic approach to managing all projects within an organization with great consideration given to their impact on the people, processes and corporate objectives. The idea is to develop a project management environment where projects are not treated based on individual merit, but as a group of interrelated goals that are linked to a single group of people with finite availability and talent.

This white paper will help organizations identify the common characteristics in their project management practice that confirm their readiness for EPM and provide basic guidelines to successfully reach the maturity required to improve their project management practice.

Best Practices in Stakeholder Management

When managing a project, the root cause of its success or failure is often overlooked. Although it is true that the project manager is the primary driver of projects, the ultimate positive or negative outcome of a project is determined by its stakeholders. This being the case, it is critical that project managers and their teams employ the best means to optimize stakeholder communications so that project expectations are met. The challenge project management office (PMO) leaders and project- centric organizations face is the ability to incorporate an effective stakeholder management methodology and tool set in their existing project and portfolio management initiatives.

In this white paper, project-centric organizations will learn about the necessary steps required to effectively implement a stakeholder management strategy that will deliver the necessary results critical to a project's success.

The Art of Project Planning

At the heart of every project lies a plan that drives the activities that result in the final outcome of the intended project or product that was initially envisioned by the customer. In the project management world the customer (whether internal or external) is king. Meaning delivering on what was planned in a timely manner will make the difference between a good customer experience and one that can go awry. The tricky thing about any project plan is that it's the project stakeholders involve that help define the level of complexity and direction of its structure. With this being the case, it is up to the project manager responsible for building the plan to manage customer expectations while identifying the needs of team members so that deliverables can be efficiently managed and met.

This white paper will provide organizations with common strategies project managers leverage to develop effective project plans that can please both team members and stakeholders who are ultimately responsible for the successful execution and outcome of the activities detailed by the project manager.

Reconciling your Limited Talent Pool with your Project Pipeline

In this paper, we will be focusing on the impact a proper project governance policy can have on the corporate decision-making process when it comes to selecting which projects should be worked on and when, as well as effective ways to manage your resources and project pipeline.

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Testimonials

EPSI

When evaluating Genius Project, we found that it had a great balance between price and available functionalities.The solution is highly customizable to fit one's reality and integrates seamlessly via an open API. They display an excellent knowledge-base via a combination of their experts and web content.

Ibrahima Bah

IT Project Manager

Flomatik

The main reason for selecting Genius Project can be attributed to the first class service delivered by the Genius team confirming that we can build a long standing partnership with a trusted advisor, rather than just a transactional supplier/customer relationship.

Another big factor in selecting Genius Project is the fact it delivers 90% of what we need today out-of-the-box and has the scalability and flexibility along with its technical team to meet our future needs. In addition, Genius Project's user-friendly GUI is nice, clean and easy to follow with direct terminology and menu options that can adapt to our business.

Matt Harrison

Head of Programmes & Service Development