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InScope

A Comprehensive, SaaS Solution for Managing Complex Projects

InScope started as a vision by two capital construction industry professionals that were fed up with unnecessarily complicated software and heavy manual processes just to manage their projects. The InScope SaaS platform allows companies to quickly and easily plan capital projects, and then track progress between between scope, schedule, and budgets in one view.

The What –
A Source of Truth for Project Management

InScope’s goal is to create a universally simple platform for the management of complex projects. Instead of working in complex, tedious, and isolated software and spreadsheets, InScope provides project managers and business leaders with a robust tool to view all their project data on one screen so they can better leverage that data across organizational reporting.

The Why –
Project Management is Hard

Most capital construction enterprise software is too tedious for nimble use. It is most common for companies and agencies to use only a fraction of the available features. Project managers prefer simpler tools such as Microsoft Project, Excel, or Word for active project management but project data is then isolated making visibility and accountability nearly impossible.

"Group of five people discussing something around a laptop in a modern office setting."

The Brief –
From Prototype to MVP, Parux Provides InScope with Design and Development Services

InScope’s founders came to Parux looking for additional front-end development and UX/UI resources. They had been working on their Minimal Viable Product for over a year and needed to get launched asap. Our first step was to evaluate the current state of the platform. Quickly, we realized they were closer to a semi-working proof-of-concept instead of a market-ready platform. The front-end technology and user interface needed an overhaul. We began working with their back-end team to develop an approach to building a stable, scalable and user-friendly application.

  • Ideation
  • UX Design
  • UI Prototyping
  • Development

The Users –
A Platform for Vendors and Owners

The InScope vision is to create a platform that connects project data between two distinct user groups, Vendors and Owners. Owners are defined as the end client who owns the constructed asset. This is typically a government agency or a large organization that owns multiple, and simultaneous, construction projects. Vendors are the companies or firms that provide the architectural, engineering, or construction services to design and build large capital construction projects. Both of these user types use similar methods to track project progress but with nuanced differences. The platform needed to have a baseline user experience while supporting each specific workflow.

The Owner –
Meet Laila

Laila is the Project Manager at a state-level Department of Transportation. She’s responsible for planning future projects, administering funding, directing design consultants, soliciting bids from contractors, and keeping track of progress on active projects. It’s a heavy workload with lots of moving parts. Laila has a limited budget and is looking for ways to improve process and make her budget stretch further.

Laila, persona representing an owner

Personality

  • Tech Savvy 5/10
  • Analytics Centric 10/10
  • Open to Innovation 8/10
  • Organization 9/10

Pain Points

  • Managing version control across the team with spreadsheets is a big challenge
  • Feels slowed down by switching between different apps and spreadsheets to keep track of projects.
  • Lacks tools and visibility to assure active projects budgets are on track.

The Vendor –
Meet Stan

Stan is the owner of a large architecture and engineering firm that works on dozens of large, complex projects simultaneously. His team and him keep track of project schedules, financials, sub-consultants, and communicate back to the project Owners. He’s also active in business development which includes tracking leads, budgeting for proposals, and more.

Stan, persona representing a vendor user

Personality

  • Tech Savvy 5/10
  • Analytics Centric 7/10
  • Open to Innovation 3/10
  • Organization 9.5/10

Pain Points

  • Project data isn’t shared easily with an over-reliance on exporting and importing.
  • Getting up-to-date data is tricky with actuals coming from outside timesheets and subcontract invoices.
  • Referencing historical experiences means compiling data from dozens of Word and Excel documents.

The Problem –
Can the Data that is Segmented Between Platforms be Consolidated into One Platform?

Managing the project lifecycle for Owners and Vendors has always been a challenge. At the start of the lifecycle, Owners and Vendors are collaborating on generating and answering RFPs. Vendors are looking at the project scope, evaluating steps and estimates for completion, and submitting a proposal or bid. This is completed with a series of steps. They look at historical project spreadsheets to inform their estimates, they pull up word docs from a shared folder for key employee bios, and they look at their Project tracking software to look at current workloads. Only then can they start a new series of spreadsheets and docs to create their response. This is all shared through email or a shared folder. This process is prone to error and data overriding by team members. To put it bluntly, it’s a time-consuming, inefficient, and inaccurate process.

And once a project becomes active, tracking actual costs is a major puzzle. A project manager has to track time entries from their team members, review invoices from subcontracts, pull expense reports, and more. This can all happen in different software. And usually that data is consolidated into a series of spreadsheets where they can track remaining budget for each line item and forecast out any overages or areas of savings.

InScope set out to address this problem. Can a single SaaS application be built to support the creation of estimates and bids and follow all the way through the active product phase? This meant a single page view where the statuses and schedules of every part of a project’s scope along with full financials including budgets, actuals, estimates and forecasts are tracked.

The Solution –
Introducing InScope

InScope is an industry-leading project management software. From project initiation through completion, InScope’s innovative suite of tools allows project managers to gain visibility on project data. This means no more guessing on project statues, line item budget overruns and more.

InScope
Project management interface for the 'First Street Reconstruction'.

Researching the Solution –
An Excel-like UI … but better.

One of the core tenants set by InScope founders was to be able to view all project details on one screen. No jumping between screens to reference different data points. They envisioned something close to Excel but with modern web-based UX touches. This was a daunting challenge. Excel is a decades old, mature program that does computational reporting very well. However, it lacks modern features like elegant prompts, augmented flows, consistent data connections and more.

Our developers and designers set out to conduct a full design discovery to look at options for implementing the founder’s vision. A ground-up solution was ruled-out as the cost to replicate a full-grid system was prohibitive for an MVP platform. Our focus shifted to researching off-the-shelf grid frameworks. This included searching for frameworks, looking at technical demos and documentation, and in some cases installing a workable prototype. This all lead to a matrix that graded each framework against the criteria of available features, customizability, upfront and ongoing costs, and licensing. One the criteria matrix was completed, we were able to work with InScope in selecting a final end-solution.

Designing the Platform –
Prototyping a Vision to Life

Once we had the framework selected, our design team went into an aggressive prototyping mode. Unlike some conceptual prototypes, these screens had to be designed against the framework functionality. We knew the design would have limitations so it would take extra creativity and due diligence between front-end developers and designers to make the single page of data vision come to life.

The key design challenge was to give the end user the ability to toggle different sections of data on and off within the grid framework. Various solutions were explored but the most viable solution gave users the ultimate flexibility. Users could expand and contract different data sets that were named “Sockets.” These sockets could contain all data points related to a project’s details, budget, schedule, and more. In order to give these Sockets a modern-UI look, each panel is represented in a unique color with a stylized header.

Project management interface for displaying phase progress, task status, budgets, and more.

Designing the Platform
Designing Multiple Project Tools into One Platform

While the project detail management tool is the focal point of InScope, there are numerous other important features that needed to be designed within the platform.

Gantt chart view of a project, showing task durations, start and finish dates, and dependencies.

Scheduling Gantt

Gantt charts are an essential part of project management. InScope’s Gantt includes standard graph features with added InScope filters and data points.

Resource allocation and workload management interface.

Workload Chart

Making sure your team is balanced is a key aspect of project management. An integrated workload chart makes it easy to gain visibility on what team members are working on which projects.

Timesheet entry interface displaying project tasks, activity codes, and more.

Timesheet and Cost Tracking

For companies assigning contracting work outside of their organization, InScope’s Contacts Management allows them to easily keep track of those assigned scope items, ensuring projects stay on track.

Subcontractor management interface showing company details.

Contracts Management

For companies assigning contracting work outside of their organization, InScope’s Contacts Management allows them to easily keep track of those assigned scope items, ensuring projects stay on track.

The Result –
A Successful Launch of a Transformative SaaS Platform

Over the course of a year, Parux worked hand-in-hand with InScope to take their proof-of-concept into a full-fledge SaaS platform that is taking on new customers and expanding daily. InScope’s platform is proving to be transformative for it’s Owners and Vendors tenants.

Key Result

From a user: “In less than a day, InScope replaced the data in about a half dozen scattered spreadsheets, five cumbersome databases, and at least a half day of staff time every two weeks – all instantly available and compiled for intuitive use and easy understanding.”

The Parux Team saved our butts! The first technology company we hired botched our application. We didn’t know where to turn but fortunately we found Parux. They took the time to understand our grand vision but then developed a roadmap strategy with us that got us to market with a buildable foundation. What impressed us most about Parux was their partnership beyond technology. Parux went way beyond a development team and became an invaluable strategic product partner.

Kevin Corwin, PE, PLS, PMP InScope Principal
Kevin Corvin
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