Costbars — Portfolio Prioritisation and Pipeline | Timebars Ltd.

Every planning cycle asks the same four questions. Which projects should we approve, delay or kill? Are we funding what we said we valued? Can we actually deliver what we have committed to? And is the portfolio balanced, or have we quietly loaded it with short, safe, low-value work?

Most organisations answer these with volume — whoever argues hardest in the room. Costbars answers them with a five-step process that turns portfolio decisions into data you can defend afterwards.

Who it is for

PMO leads, portfolio managers, and the executives who have to sign off a pipeline and then live with it.

The five steps

Each step builds on the one before. You cannot select meaningfully without scoring, and you cannot balance without knowing what you selected.

Run the full cycle at the start of each planning period, and re-run the affected steps whenever project data changes.

Step 1 — Strategic Value, scored against your priorities

The Strategic Value score reflects how closely a project aligns with what your organisation actually says matters, across four dimensions: investment category, initiative, objective and strategy.

The important part: the scoring is relative, not absolute. You set the order of importance for each dimension, and Costbars weights accordingly. A project that lands top of every list scores near 100; one sitting in low-priority categories throughout scores near zero.

Running it takes seconds. The work is agreeing the order of importance — which is a strategic conversation your organisation should be having regardless, and this is a good excuse to have it.

Where a project has enough financial data — at least four of the seven financial fields — the score blends financial metrics with strategic alignment 50/50. Where it does not, it falls back to pure strategic alignment with no penalty, so early proposals are not punished for lacking detailed costings.

Step 2 — Ability to Execute, and what it is built from

A project can be strategically vital and still undeliverable. The Ability to Execute score draws on the risk-versus-size-and-complexity assessment, the level of executive commitment behind it, the quality of the cost estimate (rough guess, history-based, or resource-driven), and — for work already in flight — health indicators and budget or hours variance.

It produces a recommendation alongside the number:

These are a starting point, not a mandate. The portfolio manager still decides. What the score does is surface the projects that need a conversation, and give that conversation an objective footing.

Step 3 — Level the resources before you commit

Before selecting, find out whether you can deliver. Step 3 plots total demand from all candidate projects against available supply, with over-allocated periods in red. Drag project bars to shift demand peaks into periods with capacity, and watch the chart recalculate as you go.

Portfolio levelling is a different question from project levelling. Not "when can this person do this task" but "which combination of start dates across all our projects keeps demand inside supply without delaying anything critical". Costbars does not automate that — you know which projects have hard constraints — but it makes the consequences of each move visible before you commit.

Step 4 — The bubble chart, where the decision becomes obvious

Every project is a bubble: Strategic Value across, Ability to Execute up, bubble size showing budget or forecast hours.

The chart is good at showing things nobody wanted to say out loud. A cluster of large bubbles bottom-left means serious budget committed to low-value, high-risk work. An empty top-right means either the portfolio is strategically adrift or the scoring needs recalibrating — and both are worth knowing.

Selection then applies a weighted formula — Strategic Value at 60%, Ability to Execute at 40% — against a threshold you set. Test runs preview which projects fall on each side before anything is saved.

Step 5 — Balance, because the highest scores are not a portfolio

Approving the top-scoring projects does not produce a balanced portfolio. Approve only short projects and you neglect long-term position. Fund only innovation and operational stability starves.

The balanced scorecard checks four dimensions:

• Strategic alignment — is budget actually flowing to your top pillar, or is a lower priority quietly dominating? The gap between what you say you value and what you fund is usually the most uncomfortable chart in the pack.
• Risk balance — budget distributed from very low to very high risk. A conservative organisation with 60% of spend in high-risk work has a structural problem that scores alone will not surface.
• Investment mix — innovation against maintenance, growth against keep-the-lights-on.
• Timeline distribution — whether everything lands in the same period.

The rest of it

Tabular and card views of the pipeline. A project assessment tool. A portfolio status and balancing report. What-if and scenario planning. An executive notification hub so the right people hear about portfolio risk early rather than at the steering group. And Ask AI for drafting business cases and risk plans.

The same canvas and scheduling engine that power Timebars are present — the PPM page sits alongside the canvas rather than replacing it, so an approved project can be resourced without leaving the suite, and work needing sprint execution moves on to Agilebars.

Configuration — your investment categories, your strategic pillars, your scoring metadata — is data you maintain, not a change request.