Presenting Costbars Project Pipeline Scheduler

A new approach to Project and Portfolio Management Tools.

Costbars Timescale View

The default view is a time scale with draggable bars representing start and finish dates. The green bar represents a sprints start, finish and duration. The blue bars represent work, issues or risk items where work estimates are generated and rolled up to the sprint bar.

Use the Filter Menu to navigate between different sprints. Hide the Filter Menu and bring it back by clicking the pink "FM" tab.

Costbars Kanban View

Switch modes to the Kanban view representing draggable work items as bars by default or optionally boxes. The green bar or box represents a sprint and provides access to hours, costs and metadata. The blue bars represent the work items again, that can be dropped into lanes for progress updates.

Use the Filter Menu to navigate between different sprints. Hide the Filter Menu and bring it back by clicking the pink "FM" tab.

Costbars Burndown View

Launch the Burndown chart by clicking on the ID number on the bottom left of the Green bar. Here you can compare Forecast to Planned where planned is your baseline.

Click [Refresh] to generate the current or forecase line. To generate the Planned line, select the Planned radio button, then click [Create]. Optionally publish to the Cloud Dashboard.

Loading... article missing or service down!...

Productivity will increase. Here is why!

Spreadsheet Synchronization

Load your project pipeline into our special spreadsheet. Many customers export from the enterprise system for this step. Once your data entry is complete, simply drag and drop the spreadsheet onto our Costbars canvas to import the data seamlessly. Continue managing your project portfolio with a graphical user interface, enhancing productivity during the planning, execution, or analysis phases.

Switch Devices

If you publish your data to the Timebars Cloud, you can pause work, switch devices, and continue where you left off. Log into the app, click the Cloud icon in the main menu, then click the 'Cloud Login!' button, log in, and click 'Re-hydrate' to download your data and continue working. Multi-user scenarios are not available unless you share the same username and password with your peers.

Efficient Scheduling and Accurate Reporting

Use the built-in scheduling engine to automatically calculate time-phased results for the Burndown Chart and other reports. Agree on the progress rules upfront. Drag and drop bars or boxes between lanes on the Kanban board to generate actuals. Sequence remaining work with the time-scaled canvas. There should be no arguments with the results.

Happy Managers

Why buy expensive, Project Portfolio Management tools? With Costbars, a modern desktop project portfolio scheduling tool for personal use, you can regain control of your data and your time. Enjoy the flexibility of working offline or online, with seamless cloud integration when needed. Benefit from intuitive drag-and-drop features for sequencing your projects over the fiscal year. Our tools ensure that you stay productive and organized without breaking the bank.

Trusted Technology

Timebars Ltd. provides a cloud-based set of management tools and utilities, including a number of scheduling engines and a dashboard sharing service. It features a three tier subscription plan for each product based on data limitations, the amount of data stored and not functionality. Our web-based products are operating system agnostic and can be used on any computer with a modern web browser, including large touch screens, desktop touch screens, smartphones and tablets. Technical details follow...

HTML5 CSS Javascript

The Costbars Pipeline Demand Planner product is a web page based on HTML5, CSS and Javascript. In December 2017, HTML5.2 specification was released as a W3C Recommendation of which we adopted. The Timescales are drawn with HTML Canvas 2D Context. The Data entered, imported and exported is stored inside the browser in IndexedDB (Google Docs uses IndexedDB).

IndexedDB

IndexedDB is a JavaScript application programming interface provided by modern web browsers for managing a NoSQL database of JSON objects. It is a standard maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Source:Wikipedia

Single-page application

A single-page application (SPA) is a web application or website that interacts with the user by dynamically rewriting the current web page with new data from the web server. Source: Wikipedia. But but for Costbars we dynamically rewrite the current web page (Timescaled page/Kanban page) from the IndexedDB resulting in sub millisecond fast transitions that make our products feel instant.

NextJS ReactJS

The Sales site and Dashboard is built upon NextJS and ReactJS which is free and open-source front-end JavaScript libraries for building powerful client and server side applications.

Stripe

We integrate with Strip Inc. for payment processing. The company primarily offers payment processing software and application programming interfaces (APIs) for e-commerce websites and mobile applications.In April 2018, the company released anti-fraud tools, branded "Radar", that block fraudulent transactions.

Strapi

Strapi is a backend REST API service that sits on top of Postgres DB. Only login requests and Dashboard publishing is dependent upon Strapi. Strapi is the leading open-source headless CMS. It is 100% JavaScript.

Costbars Functional Features

Timescale View

Manage Backlog and Work Items as bars over a timescale

The Costbars Canvas is a time scaled click, drag and drop user experience on desktop, tablets and phones. Reschedule, create or delete bars. Optionally publish to the cloud for sharing. Synchronize with our pre-configured spreadsheets for bulk data operations (Create, Read, Update and Delete).

Kanban View

Switch between Timescale view and Kanban View

Kanban View is also a click, drag and drop user experience. Moving bars into the Doing, Finalizing and Done lanes update progress. Switch to Timescale view to visually inspect and fine tune the results of the Kanban updates. Run the Burndown Chart to view velocity and predicted finish time.

Backlog Detail View

One click access to Backlog rollup of cost and schedule information

Cost and schedule are calculated based on our scheduling engine especially tailored to suit Agile methodologies. But it is flexible to suit the way you work. Our tools do not dictate your internal product development processes.

Workitem Detail View

One click access individual work item cost and schedule information

Costbars Burndown Chart

Costbars Burndown Chart (non-cloud)

Analyze your burndown chart from data stored in the browser. Use this a a preview before sharing on the Dashboard!

Publish to the Cloud

Visualize and Share data

Log into Costbars and log into our Cloud Dashboard then click publish. The Green Pubset feeds the dashboard, other pubsets are for storing and switching devices.

Cloud Dashboard Burndown Chart

Charts and Tabular Reports online

Multiple Dashboard Views, tailored to visualize and share your sprint data.

Knowledge Base

User Guides, Videos, Animations and more.

We provide Costbars with help animations, videos and other user materials to get you started. Plus we provide opinionated Scrum and Kanban methodologies to suit various types of development such as large IT system teams, smaller teams enhancing COTS products or many others.

Spreadsheet View

Use Excel or Open Office Calc

We provide a spreadsheet, either Excel or OpenOffice Calc, loaded with automation scripts. We show how to do planning in your spreadsheet and how to use our spreadsheet for data Synchronization.

Importing and Exporting

Use Excel, Open Office Calc, Google Sheets...

Importing data into Costbars is simple, drag and drop a spreadsheet into Timebars. Data is stored in the Browser and the spreadsheet. Exporting data back to the spreadsheet is also simple. Click export on the Costbars top most menu, open spreadsheet and click import!