Artificial Intelligence & User Experience Lead Innovation at Deltek ProjectCon

By Warren Linscott, Chief Product Officer & Dinakar Hituvalli, Chief Technology Officer

With 3,700 customers, product experts and partners gathered at the Gaylord National Harbor in Washington D.C. Deltek ProjectCon 2024 was an event to remember! Our dedication to continuous improvement and excellence for Deltek Project Nation was evident throughout the three-day event.

During our annual keynote, we showcased how Deltek’s innovative technology is Powering Transformation–not only meeting the needs of project-based businesses today but also anticipating their demands of tomorrow. The session highlighted our ongoing efforts to enhance project outcomes through new products and continuous improvements to our existing portfolio.

Deltek’s unwavering commitment to purposeful innovation propels us to explore new frontiers and push the boundaries of what’s possible. This relentless pursuit ensures that we remain at the forefront of delivering exceptional solutions for all project-based businesses.

Powering Transformation for Deltek Project Nation

With the rapid pace of technological advancement, we shared key insights on how we’re powering transformation in four critical areas:

Designing a New User Experience

One of the most exciting announcements was the unveiling of Deltek Harmony^TM, a new design experience intended to deliver a consistent, intuitive experience across our product portfolio, with rollout beginning in 2025 and continuing over time. Harmony will be the foundation for the future user experience (UX) of our project-based solutions.

Innovation has always been at the heart of Deltek does, and Harmony is a perfect example of how we’re continuing to evolve our solutions to work the way our users do. Understanding the growing needs of multi-generational users, we’ve prioritized creating personalized and seamless experiences that drive productivity and satisfaction, ensuring our solutions evolve with their expectations.

Harmony is tailored for project-based businesses across the industries we serve. Instead of the old days of expecting users to adapt to software, software design has evolved, we are crafting solutions that align naturally with their workflows.

The introduction of Deltek Harmony is a continuation of our journey to redefine excellence in user experience (UX), ensuring that our solutions not only meet but exceed the expectations of Deltek Project Nation.

Revolutionizing How We Work

In addition to our modernized user experience, we highlighted how we’ve been powering transformation through artificial intelligence (AI). Over the past year, we’ve revolutionized project delivery by integrating Deltek Dela^TM, our intelligent AI-powered business companion, into our industry-leading solutions. This investment in AI is a testament to our commitment to meeting the industry’s evolving needs.

Since its introduction in April, Dela has been incorporated throughout our product portfolio, assisting project-based businesses by generating and automating smart content, predicting project and organizational success with AI-powered analytics and enabling intelligent exploration with Ask Dela, Deltek’s AI digital assistant.

With Dela, we are modernizing project execution by leveraging the latest technologies, including generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), machine learning and advanced analytics. These innovations enhance the functionality and efficiency of our solutions for all users.

Enhancing Our Product Suite

Another area in which we are powering transformation for Deltek Project Nation is in our portfolio of solutions. We are excited about the products we’ve added over the past year that will help project-based businesses digitally transform. While these products individually have their own value, we continue to ensure that we are making them easy to consume by integrating them into our existing portfolio to help fulfill all stages of the project lifecycle.

One way we did that was through our recent acquisition of ProPricer. This best-in-class solution for government contractors is modernizing the way proposals get done. By streamlining the submission process and standardizing estimate inputs, users can now use data to create consistent and accurate pricing proposals.  

Another powerful addition to our product portfolio in Q1 was Replicon for time tracking for government contractors. Throughout 2024 we’ve been busy integrating Replicon Time Tracking, and Polaris PSA with Deltek Costpoint^TM, in addition to improving our integrations with other ERP systems like SAP and Oracle. Purpose-built for the unique needs of government contractors, these solutions allow for flexibility and scalability while supporting industry-leading global labor time keeping compliance compliance while having better visibility into workforce utilization project assignments.

Optimizing Service Delivery

Finally, we shared how we are powering transformation through our service delivery efforts. Last year at Deltek ProjectCon, we announced our shift to an updated release cadence, which will increase the number of releases each year. This approach set us on a journey to deliver new features, requested enhancements and innovations faster, with smaller, incremental updates that minimize disruption.

This new cadence began earlier this year with Deltek Costpoint and Deltek Vantagepoint–with more products to soon follow. We also revamped our development methodologies, adopting a data-driven, automated testing strategy and rolling out new features in a controlled manner to reduce user impact. Since then, more than 1,700 customers have benefited from these more frequent feature updates, resulting in a 65% defect reduction–making a huge difference in the overall customer experience.

Also, as part of this shift, our engineering teams have been focused on enhancing our cloud service delivery. With over 18,000 customers and 2 million daily users on Deltek’s SaaS platforms, we receive over 18,000 service requests annually. Thanks to automation and maintenance streamlining, we’ve improved our response time by 20% and cut our downtime by 40%.

We Value Your Feedback 

These are just a few ways Deltek strives to create better user experiences, offer reliable SaaS solutions and leverage AI to power your project success. But we can’t do any of this without your help ─ your feedback makes our products the best they can be.

We encourage all our customers to participate in focus groups and year-round research efforts, including our virtual UX Lab, where you can opt-in to be notified of new opportunities, including short surveys, quick usability tests and live interview sessions. 

If you haven’t already, check out the Deltek Idea Portal, an online tool designed to provide greater visibility and discussion around user-requested enhancements. This easy-to-use tool is a direct and interactive way to share your thoughts and ideas about the future of our industry-leading solutions.