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Ask Slashdot: How To Give IT Presentations That Aren't Boring?
Dmitri Baughman writes "I'm the IT guy at a small software development company of about 100 employees. Everyone is technically inclined, with disciplines in development, QA, and PM areas. As part of a monthly knowledge-sharing meeting, I've been asked to give a 30-minute presentation about our computing and networking infrastructure. I manage a pretty typical environment, so I'm not sure how to present the information in a fun and engaging way. I think network diagrams and bandwidth usage charts would make anyone's eyes glaze over! Any ideas for holding everyone's interest?"
Pizza automatically makes any meeting fun.
Oh for crying out loud! You have been asked to review a topic, provide useful information such as an overview and where to find more details.
Talk about future plans. Turn it into a discussion on additional needs.
Being entertaining is not a requirement.
And don't forget your RDF generator!
Seriously, like him or hate him Jobs could present the most mundane subject and have people clamoring for more, so maybe follow his technique.
The very worst thing I see when someone opens a presentation is "Slide 1 of 50+". If you do want to use slides, use them as a guide only. A single picture is lots better than 20 bullet points. And for heavens sake, Do Not Read The Text To Us!!!
Make sure you know your subject, prepare 4 slides max and talk about your subject. Start with a question or quiz to engage your audience. Trick them into a 'Duh...' moment. Get interactive and don't be afraid to say "I don't know"...
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Just keep it simple, minimize the number of PowerPoint slides, and brief things that may be relevant to the audience. Analogies always help so the "car analogies" comment is a good tip. I used to teach satellite communications principles and theory (e.g. orbital mechanics, decibels, satellite antenna design, RF propogation - all boring stuff) and noticed once PowerPoint was turned off and I interacted with everyone they recovered from their comas and things went well. You don't need to be a comic, juggler, clown, etc. Just keep it simple and stop at 30 minutes.
This is business, not a stand up routine. If you want to have a good presentation:
1) Limit your audience to those who need/want to know what you're presenting
2) Tell them what you know concisely and clearly.
3) Do not get bogged down in details or let people rathole.
4) Have good answers for the questions people are likely to have.
The real question you should be asking is why you're holding this event to begin with if everyone attending has no interest in the material? It just sounds like a thirty minute waste of everyone's time or just a way to make you feel like you're contributing more or something.
While there are certainly things you can do to make it more interesting (relate it to their day to day, average e-mails sent per employee, average pages accessed in a day, etc) you really can't do the impossible without making the entire presentation about something else entirely.
My only suggestion would be to not "read from the slides." Material should either be coming out of your mouth OR on the slides, never both. It is fine to describe a graph on the screen or a diagram, it is horrible to read out a paragraph of text.
Maybe Prezi will help with the boring topic? Keep people's eyes engaged?
Also, the 10-20-30 rule has always worked pretty well for me. 10 slides. 20 minutes. 30 point font.
Organize the talk by their jobs. Show them how it all works when they do what they do, and where it's most likely to fail or slow down when they do various things. You'll probably go back to a couple of key slides frequently as you move from one major job type to another, but you'll adapt to your listeners. Everybody is interested in themselves. For a big finish show them how all their jobs move together in the common system. Avoid the natural mistake of organizing it by your own job.
Although it's been said a million times before, it's relevant also here and not obviously so.
There are, broadly speaking, two ways one can approach a job. One path is the "job security" path. Hoard information. Hide passwords. Make yourself indispensable. The other path is to continually "make yourself dispensable" by sharing and documenting all information you gather. You create value for your company by continually learning and gathering more information to share.
You've posed your question regarding this "information sharing" as a company requirement. No, this is your opportunity to take the latter (and better) path described above.
First slide of your PowerPoint is a bus about to run over a pedestrian and this is where you introduce the concept of the "bus number". You frighten everyone in the room by announcing that the company has a bus number of one and that you, the speaker, are all that stands between prosperity and collapse at the company. Next slide is a photo of someone handing out candy or gifts to everyone in a crowd and is titled "Sharing".
What are you sharing? Since this is the first presentation, not a lot of detail. First thing you are sharing is the location of your "In case of IT death, look in this directory." Don't have one yet? Make one before your presentation. It should have a "README.1ST" and a concise set of documents with passwords and network diagrams. You know, those things you were (rightly) loathe to put into your presentation.
Next topic for this first presentation are FAQs. How people can fix the printer for themselves. How people can check the status of available DHCP IP's for themselves. Etc. Make people independent to give yourself more time to learn even more things. Like maybe stuff about e-mail servers, VPN's, CRM, or website design. Don't stand still!
Do you realize how valuable this opportunity is and how much it's costing your company? A salesman, like, say, an insurance salesman, would pay big bucks for such an opportunity, and you're getting it for free! Use it to:
Make yourself dispensable. It's the way to create value. 30 minutes is an enormous gift. Spend it wisely.
First thing you do is drop powerpoint. Don't start it up and open an empty presentation and then start to think what to put on the slides.
Work without slides. Focus on what you want to say. If there are diagrams, etc. - anything halfway complicated - make a handout instead of slides, because people won't remember the slides anyways, but they can take the handout with them and keep it as reference.
There are some cases, such as a demo or a walkthrough, where slides are useful, but most presentations can do entirely without, if only they were more interesting.
If you have something to say, you're already halfway there to an interesting presentation. If you are just giving a presentation because you were asked, and you think your topic boring yourself, then you need to get to the "something to say" step first. Find out what makes your job interesting. There must be something, or you wouldn't be doing it.
A good presentation doesn't try to say everything about its subject matter. It concentrates on the interesting, cool and/or important stuff and only hints at the fact that there's so much more.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Please do not do that. I have had to endure far too many of those. It is bad enough when it is your own department or field.
When it is a different department or field then ALL you are doing is pissing people off. They're just repeating YOUR words without the background to understand what they're saying. Like training a dog to "speak".
Audience participation happens IF it happens.
Trying to "force" it negates any positives from it.
To your users, your computing and network infrastructure "is" what it does. Focus on the services you offer. Let them know if you can set up internal wikis (or sharepoints), automate backups, or generate reports that people might be generating by hand. Conversely, too many people are coming to you for something they could easily be doing, show them how easy it is.
Please don't make yourself look bad by trying to make it an intro to network design course.