What is faces?

faces is a powerful and free project management tool. faces stands for flexible, automated, calculating, extendible, simulating. It is based on python, an easy to learn and powerful programming language.

Who will benefit from faces?

Anybody who is tired spending hours of trying to get your project data into a software tool, that offers limited functionality. In faces project plans are defined by simple python programs, which are indeed plain text files. Creating and restructuring project plans is much faster than any grid or formular based method could be. The whole concept of faces aims to reduce your time, you have to spend for working on your project management tool. As project manager you need your time for managing your project, not your tool.

Do you need programming for using faces?

Many project managers use spread sheets like Microsoft Excel because it is more flexible, than any existing commercial project software. Well, if you have ever tried to use an Excel macro, you did more programming than you need in faces. Project plans are defined in a declarative style without the need of any programming structure. The included faces editor is specially designed to edit project plans in a text file.

What can you do with faces?

faces was designed according to an old principle: Simple things should be be easy and complicated things should be possible. Therefore you may be content with the standard reports of faces and never to do some programming or you can add a new resource balancing algorithm and design your personal diagram. In fact here a some situations faces will be useful:

If you need a fast chart for a presentation at your boss/client, faces is your tool:
Its extraordinary editing features let you create a project very fast and you can choose between many different charts.
If you want to precalculate a project, faces is your tool:
Calculate your project in different scenarios (e.g. best-, real- and worst case) and insert controlling tasks for meetings and administrational work: Their calculated effort and cost will change when the project gets longer or shorter. Classify the efficiency of your team members: A task will need less time, when it is done by a senior than by a junior. And finally adjust the real working time within your project: You have a forty hour week, but your team members will not work all that time on your project.
If you want to simulate risk conditions, faces is your tool:
Beside the multiple scenario planning, you can create alternative plans with additional tasks and simulate different risk conditions and their effect on your delivery date and cost.
If you have a company wide project management standard, faces is your tool:
Build your own company wide report and chart library and extend faces in any way you like. One of the main design goals of faces, is to be easily extendible to custom needs. Create your company specify faces version and make your project management more efficient.
If you want to schedule multiple projects with a common resource base (sometimes also called enterprise resource management), faces is your tool:
Put all resource in one file and import it in your projects. In faces you can split a big project into several sub project or combine multiple projects to one big project and schedule all your project together.
If several people should work on your project plan, faces is your tool:
Project plans are plain text files, you can use any version control system like subversion or csv, and merge multiple changes of different people.
If you want to track your project, faces is your tool:
You can collect actual working data and faces tells you the difference to the original planning and how it will change your planning in the future. Of course faces can also track your actual costs.
If you want to use agile development techniques, faces is your tool:
Store any textual data to your task, e.g. like story card and use the SMART balancing algorithm to schedule your pair programming teams.
If you want to have an always up to date project workbook, faces is your tool:
Use the Cheetah template engine to generate LaTeX output, or DocBook or any other text format you like, with included graphical charts.

State of faces

Faces is currently in beta state. This means the framework design is pretty stable. Probably there won't be any great changes anymore, so future faces versions will most likely be backward compatible and work with project files of former versions (since 0.5.1). However there are still some important features missing and the documentation has many blank pages.

License

Faces is Open Source software licensed under the GNU GPL.

Contact

Feel free to contact me under Michael Reithinger