Want to Be More Resilient? Start With What You Already Have

When I talk with architecture and engineering (A&E) firm leaders about what’s keeping them up at night, the conversation almost always lands in the same place: pressure. Margin pressure. Resource pressure. The pressure of knowing the market is shifting and not being entirely sure how quickly they need to move. And the instinct sometimes is to look for a better tool, a better platform a different technology solution that will close the gap.

What I often come back to in these conversations, is that the answer is rarely out there. It usually already exists in the business and firms have to start by taking an honest look at what they already have, not what else they can invest in.

The Most Important Audit Isn’t Financial

Before a firm invests in anything new, there’s real value in auditing what already exists. Not a formal, months-long exercise but a hard look at how work actually moves through the business today.

One way I’ve seen this done well is deceptively simple: trace a single billable hour from when someone works on a project all the way through to client payment. Map every step, every handoff, every place a person has to do something before the work moves forward. Most firms find friction they’ve stopped noticing because it’s become part of the routine and that friction is costing them more than they realize.

But the audit doesn’t stop at process. The other question worth asking is: how much of what your ERP and project management application are you actually using? In most firms I talk to, the honest answer is not nearly enough. The automation capabilities, the AI-assisted workflows, the visibility into actual data—they’re already built in. In many cases, teams are still completing manual steps that the application is already built to eliminate, simply because nobody has gone back to look at what’s become available since the application was first implemented.

The gap between what a system can do and how a firm is actually using it is one of the most underleveraged opportunities in the industry right now. Closing the gap doesn’t require investment in a new tool; it requires a deliberate look at how a firm is using what they already have. And when firms do that work, the impact shows up where it matters most: in project margins, in time recovered, and in the capacity of the team to focus on higher-value work rather than process overhead.

Ask the People Doing the Work

Reviewing your workflows and current processes can tell you a lot, but it won’t tell you everything. The next step is equally important, and it’s one that gets skipped more than any other: talking to your own teams.

There is no better process consultant than a project manager who has been working around the same bottleneck for years. No dashboard surfaces what an accountant can tell you in five minutes about where the billing process breaks down every single month. The people closest to the work carry a detailed, lived-in understanding of where things go wrong,  but are rarely asked to share it.

The question doesn’t need to be complicated: what gets in the way of doing your job well? Ask it genuinely, and the answers will be specific and actionable in ways that no system audit will replicate.

But don’t stop at one conversation, or one role. Two project managers at the same firm can have entirely different pain points depending on their project type, their clients, and the workarounds they’ve built over time. The patterns that emerge across multiple people and functions are where the real opportunities live. Assuming one perspective represents the whole is where a lot of well-intentioned process improvement falls short.

When Automation Becomes a Competitive Advantage

Once you know where the friction lives and what your application is already capable of, the conversation about automation and AI becomes much more purposeful.

The real case for these tools isn't efficiency for efficiency sake. It's what efficiency unlocks. Catching a billing discrepancy before an invoice goes out. Flagging a resource conflict before it becomes a missed deadline. Getting the project health data a principal needs to make a confident decision without someone spending half a day pulling it together manually. These aren’t just  technology stories, They are margin stories, client relationship stories, capacity stories that compound quickly across a full project portfolio.

As firms look for ways to solve real business challenges and create lasting operational impact, the ones making the most meaningful progress share a common approach They're identifying one specific, measurable problem, applying the tools they already have to it, and building from a foundation of proven value. That discipline is what separates the firms genuinely embedding AI into how they run the business from the ones still figuring out where to start.

Resilience Is a Practice, Not a Project

Operational resilience isn’t something a firm achieves and checks off. It’s a practice of continuously  looking at how work moves through the business, closing the gaps when you find them, and building the kind of operational foundation that holds when things get harder.

The firms doing this well aren’t waiting for a crisis to force the conversation. They’re having it now while there’s still room to be intentional about it. And in a market where margins are under pressure, talent is in transition, and the pace of change isn’t slowing down, being strategic, intentional and deliberate is  a competitive advantage.

It doesn’t require a technology overhaul. It requires the willingness to ask the right questions of your systems, and of the people who know your business best. For firms already on Deltek, many of those answers are closer than they think and are built into the platform they’re already using every day.

For a broader look at how firms across the industry are navigating these same challenges, the annual Deltek Clarity A&E Industry Study, goes deeper on where firms are finding efficiency gains, how AI adoption is translating into measurable impact, and what separates the firms building resilience from the ones still reacting to it. If those are the questions keeping you up at night, it's worth a read.