Architecture and Engineering Best Practices Event Brings Community Together

The architecture and engineering community came together to explore best practices and practical solutions to the biggest challenges facing the industry at Deltek Architecture and Engineering Days.

Deltek Project Nation was excited to gather with their peers to discover how to improve business performance, combat reduced bandwidth or staffing challenges, and better manage their projects. Customers from a variety of firms gathered in Chicago and Boston for these events for the first time since 2019! Sean O’Connell, Vice President of Customer Sales for Deltek, kicked off the events.

The immersive workshops included sessions by Deltek executives, Michelle Cipollone, Vice President of Product Marketing, Bret Tushaus, Vice President of Product Management and Megan Miller, Director of Product Marketing.

Michelle shared industry insights from the recent 43rd Deltek Clarity Study, which is the longest running and most in-depth industry benchmarking report for the architecture and engineering industry. During her presentation, she emphasized the importance of using industry benchmarks , as a way to influence business strategy and business planning for the coming year. Based on attendee feedback, customers were interested in understanding how their metrics stacked up based on the study and how they could implement systematic changes to improve business processes.

Not surprisingly, staffing challenges were highlighted in the study, and identified as one of the top three challenges by 78% of financial leaders.

Project managers are struggling to be effective with staffing challenges and are getting pulled in many directions with competing priorities or maybe being pulled back into more design work due to attrition. According to a report from Business Insider, 4.2 M people quit their jobs in June and 41% of the global workforce is considering doing the same. The Clarity study shows that projects are suffering with more than 30% over budget and more than 40% behind schedule.

Michelle highlighted the importance of creating a great employee experience to lessen attrition. In an interactive session, that included insight from the many firm leaders in attendance, ideas were shared on how to implement changes to improve staffing challenges.

“Creating a great employee experience is top of mind with most leaders. We’ve all been through a lot in the last two years. Our priorities have changed, our expectations have changed, and we are trying to figure out what all of that means to the employee experience in our organizations. When employees are engaged, it leads to less turnover and happier employees. Today, recognition and a flexible work model are part of best practices to create a great employee experience and increase retention,” said Michelle.

Bret Tushuas continued the discussion with a presentation on how technology is transforming the industry, highlighting how Deltek is tapping into purposeful innovation to create solutions that support growth, profitability and productivity.

One of the highlights was introducing our latest offering, Deltek Unionpoint, a powerful yet simple integration platform to build, deploy and manage integrations. He mentioned that large organizations typically deploy 187 applications on average, and that more than 40% of companies see application integration as one of their top challenges. With the introduction of Deltek Unionpoint, Deltek customers can now more easily manage their integrations, saving time and boosting efficiencies.

Following the presentations, attendees were welcomed into the innovation lounge where Deltek product experts were available to answer questions and show live demos of our new and improved solutions. Customers had a chance to demo Specpoint, home of AIA MasterSpec, which is an intelligent cloud-based specification management system that brings together A&Es and building product manufacturers in one platform to deliver better built projects.

Another solution featured in the lounge was Deltek Talent Management. Building upon the session on creating a great employee experience, this tool helps companies innovate with new ways to engage employees, cultivate a positive corporate culture, provide opportunities for training and advancement, and easily onboard new employees.

Attendees were happy to connect with colleagues they haven’t seen in a few years and they left with a set of new tools and ideas that will help accelerate their innovation. For Deltek, being able to once again engage in person with customers and other companies from the A&E community and hear about their businesses, plus show how Deltek can help them overcome challenges, was a great experience.