Mike Corkery, president and CEO of Deltek as well as a two-time Wash100 Award recipient, recently spoke with ExecutiveBiz regarding the company’s recent Deltek Insight 2020 Virtual Event, the challenge of delivering content to the government contracting (GovCon) community and the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic had on Deltek’s customers in 2020.
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You can read the full Q&A session with Deltek’s Mike Corkery below:
ExecutiveBiz: What motivated Deltek to produce the massive virtual undertaking for Virtual Deltek Insight 2020?
“We knew early on that we would pivot all our in-person meetings to virtual, so we immediately started thinking about how we could host Insight in a format that would create the meaningful connections our customer community expects, but from the safety of their desks.
Every year, Deltek Insight brings together thousands of project focused professionals to exchange ideas, network and have some fun. This year was no different. And, by pivoting our customer conference to a virtual format, we reached over 15,000 members of Deltek Project Nation around the globe.”
ExecutiveBiz: If someone missed the live event, can they still access the event content?
“One of the benefits of hosting an online event is that we are able to offer the content for an extended period of time. The general sessions and breakout sessions will be available through December 31st. And if an attendee would like to get certified on a Deltek product, they can do that for free through October 16th.”
ExecutiveBiz: Can we expect more of this real-time, cloud-based virtual interactive forum in the future as a value driven supplement to Deltek‘s standard offerings?
“Social distancing requirements have certainly made us get creative in how we deliver content to Deltek Project Nation! I think we have been pleasantly surprised at how well we have been able to engage our customer and prospect community.
As we project into the future, we expect people will want to get the best of both worlds—when the pandemic is behind us, there will no doubt be people who will want to gather in person to network, collaborate and learn while others will want to leverage the convenience and access to timely information on demand or virtually.
We always look to be easier to access so I see us just continuing to evolve how our virtual events and in-person events cater to the needs of Deltek Project Nation.”
ExecutiveBiz: How has COVID impacted the interaction between Deltek and its customers? How has Deltek adapted?
“We have been close to 100% operational throughout the pandemic. Our priority has been the health and safety of our team, and that has guided each step we took over the past several months. Our initial steps were to bring all our employees home from traveling, close our offices and pivot to working virtually.
Since roughly a quarter of our team works remotely day-to-day, we were able to extend those capabilities such that our global team was fully virtual very quickly. And our team did a tremendous job being flexible and focusing on our customers and the needs of our business in general, while balancing personal changes at home as well.
We have also spent a lot of time focusing on the mental health and well-being of our employees so our team can deliver sustainable performance in this environment.”
ExecutiveBiz: What would you most like to share with the Deltek community at large?
“No one could have predicted how challenging 2020 would be for organizations. For us at Deltek, our customers’ expectations have not changed, even as we worked to pivot quickly to continue to operate in the ‘new normal’ of virtual teams and engagement.
I am proud to say that through this pandemic our team has been able to deliver on customer needs – and I see us coming out of this pandemic even stronger than when we entered it.”
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