Genius inside

Project@work

March 2009 Round-up of the Latest Technology Solutions.

From the BlackBerry to Twitter, popular consumer products and applications are making their way into project management solutions, helping project leaders and teams stay better connected and on top of details. Here’s our March 2009 roundup of the latest Cool Tools in the project management world.

Genius Project
The folks at Genius Inside also were looking to leverage popular consumer-electronics technologies earlier this year when they updated their Project4Domino project management product with a new BlackBerry reporting add-on. The update enables a user on any version of Projects4Domino to enter items such as billable hours, expenses and other expenditures via the nearly universal device for road warriors from Research In Motion.

While the BlackBerry connection is currently available only with the company’s Project4Domino, plans are to migrate the concept to its Genius Project, a Web-based portfolio management software offering, as well, according to Christophe Borlat, CEO of Genius Inside.

“A lot of managers spend a significant number of hours every week in planes and at the airport,” Borlat explains. “They need to have quick access to project status and to be able to approve and review documents, proposals and reports anytime, anywhere.”

He says the company has touched on a growing trend in the project-management field — more workers are under pressure to make travel time productive time.

“The ones who use this new technology understand the real benefits of such functions and find new ways to organize their day, leveraging travel time for real online project report and status updates,” he says. “As a result, they are better prepared for meetings and customer visits.”

Additionally, Genius Inside recently unveiled Project4Domino V6, which incorporates a number of new features that help companies control financial outlays and commitments, a key consideration in light of the current economic tsunami.

The latest version has built-in budgets; a system that helps prioritize project requests; a completely new invoicing module that improves margin overviews, project results and cash flows; and dashboards that can be totally customized by a user.

The latest upgrades, Borlat says, enable “greater flexibility and visibility across al aspects of the project-management landscape, especially in today’s troubled economy.” And, he says, the new features provide “unprecedented budget forecasting and control features that allow managers to accurately estimate the funds, purchasing and resource requirements for each project, right from the start.”