PROJECT Overview
Who built it, and how
Change Order Module.
End-to-end design of scope-change management for general contractors.
Product Designer
Product Designer — discovery research, service blueprinting, interaction design, hi-fi prototyping, usability testing, and engineering handoff.
Product Designer
1 Product Designer (me) · 1 PM · 1 Eng Lead + 2 engineers · 1 domain SME (ex-GC PM) · QA
Tools
Figma · FigJam · shared design-system library
Problem Statement
Three moving parts that never reconciled
When a project’s scope changes, a Change Order has to reconcile what it costs, how it moves the schedule, and where the money comes from. In the existing flow, those three lived in different places and rarely reconnected — so teams approved changes without seeing the schedule hit, and lost track of which budget line was actually paying.
Business context
It is a construction PM platform for general contractors. Change orders are high-stakes and high-frequency — they touch profit margin, owner billings, and delivery dates directly. A weak change-order experience drove budget drift, disputes, and churn, and it was a gap competitors were actively closing.
Why it mattered
Change orders are where a project's money and time are most at risk. Getting this right meant fewer disputes, faster approvals, cleaner financials, and a defensible audit trail — protecting both the contractor's margin and the platform's credibility as the system of record.
User pain points
No single source of truth. Estimates arrived by email, approvals happened verbally, and the "real" number lived in one person's spreadsheet.
Cost and schedule were decoupled. PMs could see a dollar figure but not the timeline consequence of approving it.
Funding was opaque. Owner Funded, Contingency, or Reallocation was decided informally and poorly documented — painful at audit.
Approvals didn't propagate. Someone had to manually re-key each change into the budget and schedule, so the plan and reality drifted apart.
No shared status. Trades and owners kept asking "where is this?" because there was no shared state.
The Solution
One guided flow, aligned end to end
A single Change Order carries its estimates, its combined cost/schedule impact, its approval state, and its funding path as one connected object — not four disconnected artifacts.
Impact & Results
What moved
32+
reduction in change order approval time
18+
improvement in budget variance tracking accuracy
25+
reduction in cost-related disputes.
40%
reduction in manual schedule updates
Lessons learned
The "boring" step is the hero. The automated finalization write-back created the most value by closing the gap between plan and reality.
Explain financial logic in context. Funding paths only made sense once users could see each option's budget impact live.
Automation needs a visible seam. People trusted auto-integration only once shown what it would do — with an audit trail behind it.
VISUAL DOCUMENTATION
Drawings & screens
Initiates Scope Change Requests
Funding Path Allocation
Finalization confirmation summary
@crafted by Thani
Get in touch: thanigaivasan97@gmail.com