PowerPoint Concussion
From the PMO Bytes Blog
by Wai Mun Koo
The world of project management through the monocles of culture, design, business, technology, politics, social, education, philosophy and music.
Recent Posts
Dog and Pony Show
Risky Business of Einstein
Hello Heisenberg!
Be A Good Patient
The Missing Piece
Categories
Business,
Culture,
Design,
Education,
General,
Music,
Philosophy,
Politics,
Technology
Date
I know project managers are not salespeople and we do not need to do the dog and pony show in front of our customers (oops!) stakeholders. However, we still need to be spectacular in our presentations if we want to convey our message and garner others’ buy-ins. At the end of the day, it still depends on how well we sell our story. And yes, a good presentation needs a story to back it up. Many people have this false belief that quantity means quality. However, a good presentation does not necessary need to be lengthy. Keep it short as long as it conveys your message. Refrain from using too many words which tends to bore the audience. Let the pictures do the talking.
There is a key difference between presentation slides and articles which many people are confused. People tend to use the same style for writing articles to prepare the slides. This usually results in too much text being squeezed into the miserable 10 by 7.5 inches landscape space. This is absolutely wrong. Do you expect to read through the slides during the presentation or, worse still, your audience to read them for you? Presentation slides are meant to engage the audience and not to put them to sleep with massive chunks of text. If you genuinely need to go into details, it would be better to keep a separate set of supplementary slides that you may share with the audience after the presentation. Stick to the main purpose of your presentation slides – to engage the audience. Stop puttinging them on a drip of alphabets.
I don’t claim to be an expert in presentation, but I have seen enough of poorly prepared slides to be able to tell what a good one should look like. Typically, I will go with these four simple steps,
-
Introduce Problem: Your audience needs to know why they are there for the presentation. They won’t be there is there isn’t a problem. Show them the problem and make sure they accept it.
-
Instill Fear: Once your audience has accepted the problem, the next step is to let them know the consequences if they do not deal with the problem soon enough. Paint a picture of the most horrible nightmare to them.
-
Propose Solution: After the nightmare, it is time for the entrance of the star of the night – the solution. You need to slide this in appropriately so that it does not look like a hard sell. It has to look like a natural progression.
-
Visualize Outcome: Nothing is better than to wrap up your presentation by showing your audience what awaits them at the end of the tunnel. Make sure they drool over the end result that you are showing.
It doesn’t make sense if I just talk about how to prepare a good deck of presentation slides without showing some examples. Now, let me walk the talk with a few slides below to sum up what we have just discussed.
Introduce Problem
Instill Fear
Propose Solution
Visualize Outcome
Posted on: October 28, 2012 02:56 AM |
Permalink
Comments (4)
Please login or join to subscribe to this item
Interesting coincidence, just last week I was thinking about exactly the same topic, before falling horribly sick - I can only conclude that energy can either be spent on the brain or the lungs, but not both.
Anyway, my own musings on the topic of proper presentations led me to a slightly different conclusion.
You see, as part of my college education, I had "communication" classes, where they endeavoured to teach us the "right" way of using PowerPoint. And it was just like you described, full of good tips and common sense: face the audience, keep them awake, don't read your slides, don't write whole sentences on your slides, use keywords and bullet points... In other words, use the visual support to illustrate your point, and not just have it repeat what you are already expressing orally.
Half a dozen years ago, I use these tips to the letter for my dissertation: full marks. This is something that works.
Fast forward to the present. Time and time again, I've used this approach to build my slide decks, only to be met with censure and requests for rework from my superiors. And so I am forced to consider what could be wrong about such an effective format, and the conclusion I reach is: context.
Unlike academia, where you present information to people who are there because they -want- to learn something, in the workplace you organize meetings to share information that only interest those present to varying degrees. In the workplace, your PowerPoint presentation is more appreciated if it is a summary of what you're saying, because:
- some of your attendees will arrive late, and they will want to flip through the first slides to catch up;
- some of your invitees won't attend at all, and yet they will still expect to be sent the slide deck so they can read it, and a few cryptic keywords and pretty pictures won't help them make sense of things;
- for most of your attendees, you are the n-th priority of the day (if you're lucky enough to make that list), and frankly, they have better things to do during your meeting than listen to you - reading your slides is quicker, and they can reply to their emails at the same time.
Not to mention, on a practical side, if you wake up at 4am spitting your lungs out, it's nice to know someone can pick up your slides and replace you with minimum guesswork for that steering committee 6 hours later.
All in all, corporate presentations are usually dreadfully boring, but I believe that underneath it, there is some kind of twisted logic that justifies the tedium.
Wai Mun Koo
PMO Director| Intergraph PP&M
Singapore, Singapore
Julien,
I agree with your point on different type of audience, especially those who want to read the details and hate to try to figure out the missing pieces. That is why I have also suggested to keep a separate copy of supplementary slides that you should share out to the audience. Keep the deck of slides that you are using for your presentation as simple as possible to support your points and to engage the audience and that should be sufficient.
Wai Mun Koo
PMO Director| Intergraph PP&M
Singapore, Singapore
and BTW, I hope you are getting well by now Julien. Take care and rest well...
Wayne Mack
Retired| Retired
South Riding, Va, United States
My preference for presentations is to rely on the "tell them three times" approach coupled with prioritization and "if in doubt, leave it out."
I usually will tailor a presentation to "tell them what I am going to tell them", then "tell them", and finally "tell them what you've told them." Often this becomes, present the conclusion, provide the analysis leading to the conclusion, and then summarize the conclusion.
To prioritize, for each page, ask yourself what if we stopped now? What if a fire alarm sounded right after page 3? Would the audience know what you are proposing? Instead of building to a conclusion, present your strongest arguments first. If providing options, provide the recommended or preferred option first. From experience, you do not want your audience discussing the weaknesses of the least preferred option and being mentally drained by the time you get to the preferred option. When listing items, always start with the most important item. Lead with the most important page.
Lastly, limit each page to 1 or 3-5 points. Ask yourself, what do I want the audience to remember from this page? If something does not support that message delete it. The point is not to show how much you know about the topic, it is what do you want the audience to know about the topic when you are done. People will likely focus on and remember only one key point on a page, elimate any distractions to ensure that they remember the most important item.
A well prepared presentation will tell the audience what you want them to focus on, provide supporting details, and then bring them back to the main point. The most important items will be addressed first and unimportant items will not be presented at all.
Please Login/Register to leave a comment.
|
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
- Bill Gates, 1981
|
