Innovation + Partnership: The Key to Powering Project Success

Deltek ProjectCon brought together more than 3,000 customers, product experts and partners in Orlando, Florida, for unmatched education, inspiration and fun. While there, Deltek Project Nation heard about our unwavering commitment to purposeful innovation and incorporating emerging technologies into our industry-leading solutions to help them deliver on their mission.

During the Innovation Keynote, attendees were on the edge of their seats as they listened to Warren Linscott, Chief Product Officer and Dinakar Hituvalli, Chief Technology Officer, present on Deltek’s advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI) and user experience (UX). The pair also shared their vision for how our new products and portfolio enhancements can drive better outcomes for project-based businesses.

For those unable to attend, here are the top takeaways from this year's session, which emphasized making the project lifecycle smarter by helping businesses find, win, and execute projects while reinforcing our commitment to being your partner for success.

Using AI to Help Automate Processes & Save Time  

As a technology leader, Deltek has been incorporating traditional AI into its products for several years, including our most recent launch of Smart Summaries for GovWin IQ ─ which leverages generative AI to deliver clear, concise executive briefings for federal Agency Profiles and state, local and education (SLED) Government Profiles. These summaries take the process of gathering information on agencies from a laborious manual task to an automated task, saving hours.

As AI has evolved, so have the use cases for incorporating this innovative technology. In 2017, we introduced Hey Deltek, which leveraged Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help users perform tasks and engage through voice commands. Today, Hey Deltek is evolving into our new Deltek Digital Assistant, which allows users to be more productive and efficient. Powered by GenAI, this digital assistant can answer “how to” questions about product usage and data entities like contracts or projects and carry out simple tasks like emailing a project manager with overdue tasks. 

When we combine the power of AI with our industry-specific project-based ERP and market intelligence solutions, we can easily retrieve, synthesize and generate content from the data contained within your solution to make project-based businesses more productive.

In the coming months, we will unveil additional GenAI capabilities in our ERP solutions to forecast staffing needs to execute current and new projects more accurately. As well as helping reduce the time to find and hire new talent by automating the generation of job descriptions and job postings in our Talent Management solution.  

Accelerating the Delivery of Innovative Features

Delivering new features and functionality in our project-based solutions is a critical competitive advantage we are implementing across our product portfolio to improve quality and offer more flexibility and control.

We are speeding up the pace of our innovation to be the best partner for project-based businesses,” Dinakar shared on stage in Orlando. To do this, we are moving to a quarterly release cadence, where we will have four feature releases a year, allowing us to deliver continuous value and innovation quickly and in a consumable manner to our customers.

With each release, we’ll aim for higher quality than the last, with backward compatible changes, so the latest updates do not break any existing business flows or integrations. Through our Feature Flag Methodology, customers will have more flexibility to implement these new features and capabilities ─ with the option to turn them on at their own pace. This alignment will allow customers to plan for new features and updates in advance while minimizing disruption and enhancing overall user satisfaction. 

Evolving How Users Interact with Our Solutions

Deltek has been on a journey for many years to make the user experience 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 how users use our products and delivering solutions to meet the needs of Deltek Project Nation. By investing in our people, processes and tools, we can provide the best user experience possible.

Conversational UI: An example of how we do this is through conversational user interface (UI) components that leverage a technology called Adaptive Cards from Microsoft. With the release of Deltek Costpoint 8.2, these cards allow users to securely enter data via email and then submit it back to Costpoint. This UI enhancement makes it easier for government contractors to complete their daily time or approve transactions without logging in to their Costpoint system.

Meeting Users In-App: Another way we can contribute to reduced friction and increased satisfaction with everyday users is through our in-app training engagements. If users get stuck and need product assistance, they can access our knowledge portals, product documentation and how-to content directly from their Deltek solutions. These engagements are critical to user experience and applying modern search and generative AI to these solutions will further improve the UX and enhance efficiency and productivity.

Bringing Business Functions to Users: Lastly, we are modernizing our design and information architecture – to create greater consistency in look and feel across our portfolio of products. This modernization includes, bringing certain business functions from our ERP applications into the platforms where users spend their time, such as Microsoft Teams and Outlook – giving them access to key business functions directly in a conversational UI without logging in to their Deltek application. But this is just the start; we look forward to rolling out these product enhancements across our Deltek solutions throughout 2024 and beyond.

We Value Your Feedback 

These are just a few ways Deltek strives to create better user experiences, offer reliable SaaS solutions, and builds additional connections to extend our applications to support your project needs. But we can’t do any of this without your help ─ your feedback is what 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 around the future of our industry-leading solutions. 

We hope to see you at Deltek ProjectCon next year in Washington, D.C., November 11-13!