At a .Net User Group meeting this week, I experienced two
poorly prepared speakers floundering through presentations…. As a Lead Technologist at the company I work
for, I have experience training technical staff and also giving presentations
at code camps. Here are a few guidelines
for aspiring speakers you might find helpful…
1.
Do not stand in front of your audience and read
your slides. This is offensive to your audience and not what they
came for... Your slides are there to
reinforce the information you are presenting and to give the audience a little
clarification on some terms you may use and as a visual aid for some complicated
issues.
2.
Have someone review your presentation (slides,
notes, …) who speaks the language you will be presenting in fluently. Also record at least ten minutes of your
presentation and have that same person review that. One of the speakers this week used the word “Basically”
fifty times in less than thirty minutes…
I started to flinch every time he used the term.
3.
Be Prepared - before
the presentation begins. Don’t make any
last minute changes to your presentation or demo code the night before. Don’t patch your laptop or demo servers the
night before. If possible create a
virtual image that you only use for presentations and use that (refreshed
before every presentation).
4.
Know the level of expertise of your audience. Speaking above or below their abilities will
make or break your presentation.
5.
Deliver what you promise. The presentation this
week was supposed to be on BDD (Behavior Driven Develpment). The presenter completely ran off track and
90% of the discussion was how his team mistakenly used TDD (Test Driven
Development), and was unhappy with the results.
Based on his loss of focus we only heard a rushed 10 minute presentation
on DBB which was a disservice to the audience.
6.
Practice your presentation with your own small
team before you try this on a room full of people you don’t know. A side benefit of doing this with your own
team is that you can get candid feedback from your team and also get kudos for
training your own team. I find I can
also turn my presentations into technical white papers and get a third benefit
from the work I’ve put into a presentation.
7.
Sharpen your own saw. Pick a topic that is fairly current. Something you would like to learn about and
would benefit your current career path.
8.
Have fun doing it.
