Living Scope

Living Scope: One Source of Truth for Project Financial Health

Company: Lessen | Role: Sole designer, partnering with a PM, EM, and Program Manager | Timeline: Dec 2022 - Feb 2023

Impact summary

Designed Living Scope, a centralized view pulling every line item from a project's original scope and all subsequent change orders into one living document, with built-in visual indicators for financial risk. The feature was used widely enough that when Lessen merged with another company, I was asked to rebuild it on the merged company's platform.

The problem

Change Orders solved tracking individual scope changes, but it created a new problem: a project's full financial picture was now split across multiple places, the original scope document, which couldn't be edited once set as the record of truth, plus however many separate change orders had been logged since. There was no single place to see everything together, or to understand at a glance whether a project's margin was healthy or at risk. Our internal team noticed this gap directly.

My role & the constraint that made it hard

I designed Living Scope as sole designer, working closely with a PM, an Engineering Manager, and a Program Manager. The real difficulty was twofold: figuring out how to visualize project risk in a way that was immediately meaningful, not just another number, and reconciling line items from genuinely different sources, original scope and multiple change orders, into one coherent, trustworthy view.

Process

Discovery: With scope data now split across original documents and however many change orders existed, the team recognized users had no way to see a project's true, current financial picture in one place.

Key decision: I surfaced risk and health directly in financial overview cards at the top of the page, color-coded, yellow for margin at risk, red for poor margin, so a user could assess a project's health before reading a single line item. Since line items couldn't be edited directly within Living Scope, each one linked back to its actual source, the original scope document or the specific change order it came from, for editing, with a quick link to create a new change order if something needed to be added entirely.

Trade-off: Each line item carried a lot of data, and keeping the view scannable while still surfacing that depth was a real tension. I made each line item collapsible, collapsed by default, showing only top-level info in the row, with full detail available in an expanded card. This kept the page readable at a glance without hiding the depth users needed when they actually needed it.The solution

The solution

Living Scope gave users a single, color-coded view of a project's full financial health, combining original scope and every change order into one place, with clear links back to each line item's source for editing.

Outcome

• Adopted by all internal users, and so popular internally that, following Lessen's merger with another company, I was personally responsible for rebuilding Living Scope on the merged company's platform.

• Gave users a single source of truth for project financial health that hadn't existed before, closing a real gap created by Change Orders' own success.