Enhancing the Project Lifecycle: A Glimpse into Deltek PPM Innovations

At Deltek ProjectCon 2023, the Deltek Project Portfolio Management (PPM) product team unveiled their vision for making the project lifecycle smarter through new innovations. The kick-off session provided insights into recent enhancements and the product roadmap for key features coming soon to PPM products.

The PPM product team highlighted how Deltek is purposefully innovating in the “Manage” phase of the project lifecycle through generative AI, traditional AI, improved ease of use, platform security and more.

Generative AI will help manage variance narratives

The PPM team introduced features that will leverage generative AI to increase efficiencies in producing narratives to provide explanations, impacts and corrective actions for project variances. Narrative Smart Scores will help ensure that variance narratives are submitted complete, clearly-written, and addressing the issues at hand.

Some Narrative Smart Score highlights include:

• Scoring variance details based on criteria such as clarity, conciseness, relevancy, structure, completeness, metrics, quantification and more.
• Improvement tips for criteria that didn’t score well.
• AI suggested narrative content intended to improve scores.

The PPM product team expects to release its first generative AI feature in PM Compass by the end of the year, with similar functionality being added to Cobra shortly thereafter.

Traditional AI can be leveraged to help improve the probability of project success

Acumen Touchstone benchmarking will enable customers to benchmark their projects with their metrics and success criteria and use that analysis to identify specific areas to improve project success.

• Benchmark scores will be leveraged between similar projects and utilize phases and other categories to group projects and report.
• Data points will be plotted on a graph to illustrate a successful glide path so projects can be compared based on quantitative metrics and qualitative measures of project success.
• Users will be able to ask a tool like Deltek Mentor to provide details on how projects differ to get specific details about the metrics and benchmark attributes compared in the report.
• Projects predicted to not be in the glide path, based on user criteria, can be compared to others to develop an action plan to get them back on track.

The PPM product team indicated that this functionality would be coming soon but they didn’t provide a specific timeframe.

Navigate naturally and explore effortlessly with improved ease of use

The PPM product team aims to provide improved ease of use for a range of PPM products.

• Open Plan 8.7, being released in Q1 2024, will add new functionality that makes it easier to add new views to many or all projects. Users will be able to select projects in the explorer and simply right-click to Add Views. This idea was submitted to the Idea Portal.
• Open Plan 8.7 will also include a system option to specify the colors for selected rows/columns, making it easier to read selected text.
• Acumen 8.9, being release later this year, supports viewing details of activities and their risks at the same time.
• Cobra 8.6 and PM Compass 8.5, expected to be released by the end of 2024, will also offer enhanced ease of use. The PPM product team is looking at a range of feature candidates; many of which came from the Idea Portal. Stay tuned for more details.

PPM Security, admin elevated, web enabled

The PPM product team introduced a prototype of PPM Web Security, a security tool being developed to support our on-premises products. The tool, expected to be released in the second half of 2024, will provide a consolidated interface that provides more control and ease of use for PPM administrators. In addition to enhanced license and password management, the tool will allow users to easily create users and groups and assign roles at a more granular level.

Key Takeaways

The key themes were leveraging new technologies like AI and automation together with UX improvements to make the project lifecycle smarter. But ultimately, the focus is on providing solutions to enable users and organizations to power project success and deliver projects on time and on budget.

The roadmap demonstrates Deltek's commitment to evolving our PPM products. The coming innovations should provide real productivity and performance gains for any project-based business.