Costbars Project Pileline Scheduler
Easily Manage your pipeline of project investments!
Costbars Major Features
Portfolio Canvas Overview
Launch into comprehensive portfolio management with our intuitive timeline interface. View your entire project portfolio at a glance, with portfolio bars (brown), projects (green), and detailed work items (blue) all visually organized on an interactive canvas.
Drag and drop elements to adjust timelines, with automatic roll-up of costs and resource calculations throughout your portfolio hierarchy. Make dynamic portfolio adjustments in real-time with visual feedback.
Your entire portfolio at your fingertips.
Objective Project Assessment Tool
Evaluate project feasibility, complexity, and risk across four critical dimensions—technical risk, political risk, size, and complexity—before committing resources. Generate objective feasibility scores (0-100) with color-coded risk levels and tailored recommendations.
Eliminate guesswork from go/no-go decisions by comparing competing projects using consistent criteria. Identify hidden complexity early and build defensible portfolio decisions backed by data rather than politics or optimism bias.
Remove politics from project selection.
Executive Alert & Risk Monitoring Hub
Stay ahead of project trouble with proactive portfolio risk monitoring. Configure precision thresholds for budget overruns, schedule delays, strategic value, risk/complexity, and executive commitment levels.
The system continuously monitors your portfolio and automatically sends context-rich alerts via SMS, push notifications, and email when high-priority projects cross critical thresholds. Eliminate alert fatigue with intelligent filtering that ensures executives receive only high-value alerts warranting immediate attention.
Know about problems before they escalate.
Portfolio Detail & Balancing Report
Gain complete portfolio visibility showing exactly where your investment dollars, work hours, and risk exposure are allocated across in-flight, approved, and proposed projects. See at-a-glance portfolio health indicators for scope, schedule, cost, hours, risk, and issues.
Drill into strategic alignment analysis showing budget distribution across strategic pillars, benefit types, and initiative categories (Maintenance, Innovation, Growth, Compliance). Identify critical portfolio imbalances and receive specific recommendations for rebalancing to maintain alignment with organizational risk tolerance and strategic objectives.
See where every dollar and hour goes.
Strategic Balanced Scorecard
Measure and visualize portfolio performance across multiple strategic dimensions using integrated balanced scorecard capabilities. Track projects against strategic drivers, financial metrics, resource utilization, innovation indicators, and risk profiles.
Generate scorecard views that show how your portfolio aligns with organizational objectives, identify gaps in strategic coverage, and make portfolio adjustments that maintain balance across competing priorities. Ensure your portfolio delivers value across all dimensions that matter to your organization.
Align portfolio with strategic objectives.
Strategic Prioritization & Scoring
Customize your prioritization framework to match your organization's strategic objectives. Define and weight multiple criteria to create a comprehensive scoring system for project evaluation. Score projects against custom strategic criteria and visualize alignment across your portfolio.
Use automated scoring calculations to remove subjectivity from portfolio decisions while maintaining flexibility for management input. Easily adjust prioritization models as strategic priorities evolve, ensuring your portfolio remains aligned with organizational goals.
Strategy-driven portfolio optimization.
Multi-Dimensional Scoring Engine
Evaluate projects using multiple weighted criteria to generate objective portfolio scores. Compare projects across different dimensions including strategic fit, ROI, risk levels, resource requirements, and complexity.
Make informed portfolio decisions with comprehensive project data at your fingertips. Use consistent, defensible criteria to support go/kill decisions and ensure optimal resource allocation across your portfolio.
Objective decision-making through data.
Visual Selection with Bubble Charts
Visualize your portfolio decisions with interactive bubble charts that display multiple project attributes simultaneously. Compare projects across dimensions like cost, benefit, risk, and strategic alignment in a single view.
Make confident selection decisions by seeing the full picture of your portfolio options in an intuitive visual format. Quickly identify which projects deliver the best strategic value for your investment.
See your portfolio choices clearly.
Comprehensive Pipeline Visibility
Gain a one-row-per-project view of the entire portfolio pipeline, displaying configurable data points like cost, hours, schedule, priority, risk, and strategic alignment. Access detailed portfolio data in our powerful tabular interface.
Sort, filter, and analyze projects based on key metrics. Toggle between tabular, card, and canvas views to get the perfect perspective on your portfolio. This clarity addresses the PPM challenge of poor visibility, enabling quick analysis and strategic oversight.
Complete visibility into your project pipeline.
Intuitive Card View Analysis
Switch to our intuitive card view for a visual approach to portfolio management. Each project card displays key metrics, status indicators, strategic alignment scores, and risk levels in an easy-to-scan format.
Quickly identify high-priority projects and potential issues with color-coded status indicators and progress tracking. Perfect for executive briefings and portfolio review meetings.
Visual portfolio management made simple.
Resource Demand & Project Leveling
Balance your portfolio's resource demands across time periods with our advanced leveling interface. Visualize resource conflicts and overallocation across your entire portfolio. Link projects with predecessors and dependencies to schedule and adjust resource demand in real-time.
Drag and drop projects to adjust timing and smooth resource demands while maintaining strategic priorities and project dependencies. This tackles inefficient resource planning, ensuring optimal allocation and preventing resource bottlenecks.
Optimize resource utilization across your portfolio.
Spreadsheet-Based Data Management
Eliminate tedious web forms with spreadsheet templates (compatible with Excel and Open Office Calc) pre-loaded with portfolios, projects, tasks, resources, risks, and issues. These sync seamlessly with Costbars, streamlining data entry and management.
Leverage familiar spreadsheet tools for bulk data updates and portfolio scenario planning. The Portfolio tab in spreadsheet templates pulls only specified field data, allowing tailored reports with your corporate data—a major time-saver for PPM practitioners.
Work the way you're used to working.
Cloud Analytics & Secure Report Sharing
Access a cloud-based dashboard with pre-built graphs, line charts, pie charts, bubble charts, and tabular reports. Leverage integrated local dashboard analytics tailored for go/kill decisions, using PPM-specific data points and strategic drivers.
The Pubset feature enables secure, configurable report sharing with stakeholders, supporting data-driven decisions and executive communication. Benefit from end-to-end TLS (HTTPS) encryption with no data stored on servers, ensuring secure handling of sensitive project information.
Secure insights, shared intelligently.