Before the coronavirus outbreak, the contracting community expressed “high confidence” in public sector sales for 2020, expressing optimism in steady government buying following 2019’s lengthy government shutdown that set many companies back.
Now, amid a pandemic with no end in sight, a largely remote workforce and other contractor challenges, the contracting forecast for 2020 and beyond is much less certain.
“We saw a strong performance across the board in 2019, and as we entered 2020, the outlook was rosy,” said Amy Champigny, senior product marketing manager at Deltek. “Now, to some degree, that has happened, but not in the way people expected. The COVID-19 pandemic is going to force a lot of contractors to think carefully about how they come out of this.”
Champigny spoke with Nextgov about Deltek’s Government Contractor Confidence Index, a wide-scale survey of hundreds of government contractors regarding issues, trends and opportunities impacting the market. At the time the survey was field—between Jan. 6 and March 2—70% of contractors expected government sales to be higher in 2020 than 2019. Now, “consensus expectations call for significant negative growth in the second half of 2020, and there is not yet a clear path to recovery,” the authors state.
Even before the pandemic, however, the survey elevated trends that are significantly impacting the contracting community. They include an “ongoing struggle for talent,” compliance challenges with “ever-increasing regulation,” the increased importance of data availability, prioritizing IT investments and portfolio diversification.
Technology-specific challenges mirrored overall contracting challenges, with 64% of respondents citing IT and data security as a “top challenge” and 57% concerned about meeting regulatory requirements. Just over half—53%—of respondents said they planned to move ..
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