Solo Consulting Engagements

Step 1 — The Starting State

U.S. consulate offices around the world are required to track and confirm their monthly procurement data — how funds are being used, and a final end-of-month sign-off that the numbers are verified. An unconfirmed consulate at month end isn’t just a missing data point — it’s a real compliance risk.

The existing tool made it nearly impossible to see compliance status proactively. Regional managers could find out which posts were unconfirmed if they looked hard enough, but there was no clear, at-a-glance view across a region. By the time problems were visible, it was usually too late to resolve them before month-end.

Step 2 — Discovery

Two to three targeted user sessions with regional office staff — the people who actually had to follow up with posts — and product owners who understood the compliance requirements. The sessions confirmed that the core need wasn’t reporting. It was action: who do I need to call today, and why?

Step 3 — My Approach

A two-level dashboard. The regional overview shows confirmation status by post as a horizontal bar chart — confirmed vs. unconfirmed — with regions that fall below an 80% threshold surfaced as alerts. Summary cards show total spending, confirmed post count, and unconfirmed count at a glance.

Drilling down into a region opens the post-level detail: FPDS vs. GFMS comparison showing the data gap, a discrepancy table categorized by type (date, vendor name, award type, etc.), and a clear status panel — Unconfirmed, with a “Confirm review” action button. The design is built around making action obvious, not just information visible.

Step 1 — The Starting State

Agents working active cases needed to track income, expenses, and offsets against a case budget — and the existing process was almost entirely manual. To log expenses, an agent would upload a credit card statement as a visual reference, then manually key in each line item one by one. The statement and the data entry lived separately; there was no connection between them. For agents juggling multiple cases, this was a significant time drain on work that should have been fast.

Step 2 — Discovery

Multiple SME review sessions with product owners who were former agents and current supervisors. They came in with clear domain knowledge about what they needed to see. The design challenge was mapping established expense-tracking best practices to the specific structure of case finance — income, expenses, offsets and returns, accounting line allocation — and making it fast enough that it didn’t slow down the agents doing the work.

Step 3 — My Approach

The interface is structured around the case as the central object. The case overview leads with a financial summary bar — beginning cash balance, income, expenses, ending balance — so users always have orientation before they act. A sidebar navigates between financial categories (Overview, Income, Expenses, Offsets & Returns, and additional planned sections) without leaving the case context.

For expense entry, a drawer pattern lets agents add and edit line items in a panel over the main view, keeping the case summary visible. For imported statements, parsed line items arrive with system-recommended category assignments; agents move through them quickly — approving, reassigning, or flagging — rather than building each record from scratch.