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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.
Car analogies, lots of them!
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.
...strippers. Problem solved.
Walk around. Vary the intonation of your voice. If you need to use PowerPoint, don't make it text heavy, but just put up the brief points you want them to memorize.
I give 10 or 20 workshops every year around the country, and I can usually capture the interest of an audience without needing PowerPoint.
Make up a bunch of cards with servers names, routers, etc.. all the infrastructure pieces.. then hand them out randomly as people come in..once everyone is in.. make them recreate the system.. maybe get some string for wires.. make it physical, involve the participants and it wont be boring..
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
Record a video of yourself giving the presentation. You will see the some areas you can work on. Put the video on YouTube and ask your friends/family for feedback.
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.
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.
Play buzzword bingo. Give prizes for winners.
Once a month we do a brownbag where people come in and do presentations. It's voluntary and fun.
The best thing to do is to have toys to show off. Just recently I walked around with a "coupon", an 8" diameter chunk of steel cut from a pipe. This let me talk about water pressure, safety (there's 4,000 lbs of force behind that coupon in a waterline) and give everyone a visual of that thing coming loose and whacking someone in the face. Perhaps not related, but it let me segue into our control system, and 25 miles of fiberoptic cable, and control infrastructure that lets us control our water delivery throughout 250 miles of waterlines.
Tell stories, illustrate your points with real world events. Don't dwell on statistics or numbers; talk about what those numbers mean and why they're important.
Yes, you are an entertainer. At least if you want to keep your audience from falling asleep.
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.
Not for the boss, not for yourself, not for the topic. For the people who sit there. It may sound logical, but it's rarely really the case.
Of course you're making the presentation because your boss wants you to. Or because you actually want to. Neither is important. It's not even important what you want to transport. If you cannot reach your audience, everything else is moot.
Don't mix and match if there's any chance. If you toss programmers together with marketing people and do a presentation about IT, you're going to fail. No matter what you do. You will either bore the programmers or talk over the heads of the markedroids. And either means that they will simply "shut down" and mentally leave your presentation.
Get them involved. This not only "forces" them to be attentive but it also gives you immediate feedback whether they actually understand what you try to tell them. Try to turn it from a monologue into a dialogue and maybe a discussion. Listen to their questions (and I don't mean the standard token "if you have any questions please ask" crap), watch their faces, you will see when someone has a question, actively get them to ask them. People sometimes don't dare to ask, either because they fear that they will appear "stupid" for not understanding something or because they are afraid to either piss off you or their peers, you, because you might not want to answer questions and their peers because they want to get out of the presentation.
Powerpoint. Use it sparingly, or leave it out altogether. It got old ages ago. No matter how you spin, flip or animate the crap, nobody gives half a shit about it anymore. If there's any chance, use pictures instead. Depending on your corporate culture, a "shock and awe" approach can be very useful to get your point across. I once had a presentation about IT security where I used the husk of a computer that was detonated with C4 as a metaphor for a hack, trust me, it struck a chord and it stuck. People usually enjoy looking at pictures that make them go "wtf-omg", at least a LOT more than looking at bulleted lists, and those bullet lists never got my point across at least anyway. You can hand them the documents if you are so inclined, but don't lecture it to them. You may do a lot with your audience, but you must not bore them or they will mentally take a stroll through their happy place while they park their carcass in front of you.
And most of all, keep it practical. They have to have the feeling that they can take something out of this meeting that helps them in their job. Try to stay away from theoretic drivel, it bores them. They don't like computers, at least not necessarily. They also aren't really interested in your job, or they would have chosen your career instead of theirs. And most of all, they don't give a damn about how you do something, why you do something and often not even why they should do it. Give them something practical and something that makes their life easier and they'll gladly listen and take your advice. Depending on the support you have from your higher-ups, you could have them toss something "bad" at your audience and let you come in as the one to save the day. To give you an idea what I mean, a little anecdote. I once was tasked to get the new ITSEC rules to our staff. It would be approximately 50 pages of rather dry and very technical stuff per user, something you can't easily sell. My boss helped me by first demanding that everyone reads and heeds everything, even the parts that don't apply to them, totaling about 500 pages. In a nutshell, when I was offering meetings that showed them how to prune it to just 50 pages per team, they were quite eager to come.
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