Project Creation
A well-defined project is a project with the highest potential for success completion.
Unfortunately, the project definition step is one that is often neglected and therefore the cause of most project problems. Properly defining a project means clearly explaining what you want to do, how you want to do it, what time frame you want it to be done in, within what budget and dependent upon which well-defined constraints.
A project is a set of documents that usually consists of a Project description, a Project, Tasks, Deliverables, Risks documents and so on. To define a project using Geniusproject, at a minimum the "Project description" must be created.
There are several ways to create a project:
Create a project using the Project Wizard. It is intended to streamline the project creation process. The project leader uses a single interface to fill in the main project data.
Create with the Project Wizard using a Project template. This is a powerful way to inherit a predefined project structure including your best practices. See "Project templates" for a better understanding of this feature.
Copy a project that already exists.
Promote a Project request into a "Project description" in a "Projects" database. See the "Project request" chapter for more information.
Promote an Assignment into a new project. This is a useful feature when a task assigned to someone has to be managed as a project by this resource, because of its complexity.
Using Geniusproject’s Project wizard will always create at least the following three records:
The Project description, containing the most important project information. It is also commonly referred to as the "Project charter".
The Project plan, a Gantt chart to plan the project. The Project budget to define allocated financial resources, and depending on the setup and usage, also the expected income.
Geniusproject’s Project Creation Wizard has been designed to simplify the user’s project creation experience by walking them step by step through the process and ensuring they do not leave out any critical creation steps.
The Project Creation Wizard quickly captures important project information, but more can be entered using the Project description form.
To use the project wizard:
Navigate to the Projects tab on the Module navigation menu.
Select New Project from the contextual navigation.
The project wizard is made up of the following elements:
A navigation bar indicating the steps.
Navigation buttons to move forward or backwards during the process.
Content dialog box to input the data for the active step.
These classification groups are very helpful for reporting purposes. Only 4 of them are static fields in Geniusproject: Sub-project of, Type, Customer and Priority.
The budget screen is where the financial resources allocated to the project are defined as well as its external rates if the project is billable.
A project budget can be detailed or not. If the budget is not detailed the user can simply enter the total anticipated workload split across internal and external labor. It is also possible to enter the internal and external/ billable costs associated to the workload as well as other non-labor related project expenses.
If the budget is detailed, it is then possible to define the costs and billing targets with more finesse, depending on budget axes defined in the application settings. For more information see Detailed budget. Now it is time to define your project team. This section is used to select the project participants and identify their role in the project. Geniusproject suggests a predefined team structure with predefined groups and roles.
Note: The following form only appears if no project template has been selected. If a project template has been selected, a different form appears where it is possible to replace the resources inherited from the template by the resources of your choice. Once the project has been created, the form as shown hereafter can then viewed under Project Description.