Deltek ProjectCon: Better Software for Better Projects

Deltek ProjectCon, our annual user conference, brought together more than 3,000 customers, product experts and partners in Nashville, Tennessee, this week. And while Nashville is home to a passionate community of musicians, Deltek has its passionate community of project enthusiasts—Deltek Project Nation. We are united by our love for projects and finding innovative ways to power our customers’ success.  

One of the most highly anticipated sessions at Deltek ProjectCon this week featured Warren Linscott, Chief Product Officer, and Mike Scopa, Chief Technology Officer. The pair, also known as Deltek's Product Brothers, led a lively and informative session about how Deltek drives purposeful innovation across our technology to enhance the user experience, ensure a cloud-first architecture, and expand your product ecosystem.

Our leaders were excited to share details about our progress this year and our ongoing commitment to help drive better project outcomes through new products and continued enhancements to our existing portfolio.

Creating More Productive People with Better User Experiences

Deltek has been on a mission for many years to make the user experience (UX) more impactful−creating project-based solutions that are easier to use and understand. We’ve made significant strides on this promise by taking the complexity out of our products and delivering solutions to meet the needs of Deltek Project Nation. “Better software for better projects and we know you cannot have better projects without happy users,” noted Warren.

The user experience is vital to our products, which is why we’ve been focused on increasing our investments in this are−adding resources and capabilities to our project-based solutions to evolve with the industry. “UX is more about business transformation and business process transformation than design. Therefore, we are re-imagining business processes through modern user experiences,” explained Mike.

Mike and Warren shared many new capabilities during their session, including Deltek Maconomy with its refreshed web-based user interface and Deltek Vantagepoint, which will begin offering a Dark Mode, otherwise known as a high contrast mode, in 2023 to support users that spend longer periods of time in the product. They also shared recent enhancements to Deltek Costpoint Mobile App that provides a more intuitive mobile experience to enter time and expense, which has garnered an impressive 4.5-star rating in the Apple App Store with more than 4,000 reviews and counting.

With countless product updates released last year, it was important to highlight enhancements to address the more time-consuming and costly manual processes. From incorporating Artificial Intelligence to improve recruiter productivity and candidate screening in Deltek Talent Management to building automatic bank feeds in Deltek Vantagepoint and Deltek Ajera, we are driving automation technology across your key industry business processes. Additionally, we have simplified data entry by introducing a Natural Language Processing (NLP) capability to Deltek Costpoint. Hey Deltek! for Costpoint will enhance the user experience by incorporating voice-activated time and expense and contract entry within the Costpoint desktop or PWA mobile apps for time and CRM.

Delighting customers and product users really started with digital experiences for more commercial B2C industries such as streaming services, video games and social media. However, it has become an important goal for Deltek’s B2B focus across all our industry products and business processes. Warren went on to say, “UX is more about business transformation and business process transformation than design. Therefore, we are re-imagining business processes through modern user experiences.”

Building Better User Experiences Through a Cloud First Environment

Deltek is on a never-ending journey to build cloud-first SaaS solutions for our project-based customers. In fact, for the last decade, we’ve been committed to building world-class robust SaaS products and extensible and secure PaaS environments, supporting over 15,000 companies and over 1.8 million cloud users.

We realize that cloud computing isn't new for businesses or Deltek, even though recent studies showed that 98% of companies are still running their on-premises hardware servers to maintain IT infrastructure. Now, companies are migrating to SaaS solutions more than ever, looking for extensibility, accessibility and reliability for better business continuity.

During their session, Mike and Warren provided Deltek Project Nation a glimpse into our future product updates and enhancement schedule to help with better business continuity and management—more frequent smaller updates. By moving to this methodology and away from larger and less frequent updates, will be easier for our cloud users to not pause to better manage their updates and take advantage of incremental enhancements.

Deltek also recognizes that application code needs to perform well in a multitenant environment, so we are moving to more serverl-ess technologies to improve our scalability, reliability and drive more resiliency.

Lastly, the Product Brothers announced our continued commitment to security and maintaining high standards against the many industry and global compliance standards. Understanding there are so many facets to keeping your data secure, our extended team will continue to ensure our products meet these security certifications; including support for FedRAMP, SOC I and SOC II, CMMC, and more−that we map our products, development and deployment to support all these security needs where applicable.

Security is often seen by companies as one of the biggest advantages when they're trying to move towards a cloud-first strategy. Deltek’s security posture and our ever increasing focus and investment in application and cloud security can be your greatest accelerator by introducing security at speed and scale across your business.

Expanding the Partner Ecosystem with Connections

But growing companies need more than just solutions to be successful; they need an ecosystem of partners to maximize their product investments to help them thrive. Our goal is to connect and automate the product lifecycle that fuels your projects. Therefore, we are focused on the green field between the project lifecycle stages to bring more value to the products you already own.

For example, Deltek Business Services, a new offering designed to help project-based businesses fills in these gaps by finding the best products and service providers to help you overcome your business challenges while saving time and resources.

Deltek Pros™️ Bookkeepers, a unique partner program launched in September of this year, is an excellent example of an extensible service. This new solution connects customers with trusted accounting professionals knowledgeable of their industry’s business needs and Deltek ERP products. Currently available for Costpoint customers, Deltek Pros™ identifies industry experts to help maximize the value of your products, unlock potential, accelerate operations and improve profitability.

Similarly, Deltek Payments, a suite of financial tools that empowers U.S.-based customers to accept digital payments, present their customers with integrated payment portals, and pay suppliers digitally. Uniquely built for Costpoint, Vantagepoint and ComputerEase users, Deltek Payments can modernize and digitize payment processes, lower days sales outstanding (DSO), reduce reconciliation and save you money. In partnership with our Marketplace partners, Deltek Payments is a natural evolution for our customers and us.

But we know none of this matters unless you can connect all your disparate systems on which you run your business. This is why integration platforms play a critical role in business digital transformation. Through our multipart strategy, which includes supporting a low code or no code environment, building an ecosystem of applications and integrations, and evolving the API management solutions and platform to enhance product extensibility−we’ve been working hard to improve our Deltek products and bring more value to the ones you already own.

One of the highlights of the Expanding the Ecosystem section and keynote as a whole, was the announcement of Deltek Unionpoint, our new cloud integration platform as a service (iPaaS). This latest offering expands the connectivity options for project-based businesses and opens the door for Deltek Project Nation by providing easier integrations to a vast range of applications and data. Unionpoint is based on a foundation of integration capabilities that Deltek already offers and gives customers the power to connect across our industry-specific products, current on-premises applications and between other point and best-of-breed solutions.

For example, Deltek Unionpoint currently integrates with Vantagepoint and Talent Management. ”Putting the power into your hands to meet the needs of the business,” explained Mike, and will expand and support additional Deltek solutions beginning in early 2023. So regardless of what industry you serve, Unionpoint will give you the power to build, deploy, and manage integrations to and from your Deltek solutions, helping you get the most out of your investment.

We Value Your Feedback

We’re excited to be continuously creating better user experiences, offering better and more reliable SaaS solutions, and building connections to extend our applications to better support your projects. We couldn’t do any of this without your help.

We encourage all our customers to participate in focus groups and early adopter programs, as well as year-round research efforts such as the virtual UX Lab, where you can opt-in to be notified of new opportunities; including short surveys, quick usability tests, and live interview sessions. “One of the things that makes this event so rewarding is the ability to connect directly with Deltek Project Nation in the XPO and the UX Lab. I can’t wait to hear what users think about our upcoming enhancements and proposed features−it’s this type of feedback that helps us shape future product releases,” said Warren.

Deltek Project Nation can also provide feedback through the Deltek Idea Portals, an online tool designed to provide greater visibility and discussion around user-requested enhancements. Within each of the ten product portals, users can submit product ideas, discuss ideas with peers and vote on other ideas submitted through the tool.

It’s your feedback that helps make our products the best they can be! With more than 300 Ideas already integrated into our products and more than 250 more in progress, we’re excited for our customers to interact directly with our Product Management team and for our team to gain visibility into product ideas from users to help shape the future of Deltek solutions.

To learn more about how Deltek can help support your project-based business, subscribe to our Inside Deltek Project Nation newsletter and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.