Make your next presentation great by avoiding these common pitfalls
5 tips I learned from years of working with students
by Blair Hudson, talk originally titled ‘5 things you can easily do to make sure your final presentation doesn’t suck’
If you only take away one thing from this post, make it this list of to-don’ts. Next time you’re preparing a presentation, make sure you don’t tick any of these boxes:
Some Background
I was recently asked to give a presentation on the topic “presentation skills” to a group of final year undergraduates studying IT. The students would be 7 weeks into a semester long group project, working with a real industry client, with their own final presentation looming only a few short weeks away.
For context, I’ve been working with students from this university (Macquarie University in Sydney) since I finished studying there in 2013. To complete the degree, students are required to undertake a 13 week project with a client sponsor. During my studies, I completed this at EY (or back then, Ernst & Young), which led to an internship and subsequently a graduate position.
As a graduate, I took on the leadership of this program from the client perspective, and continued to work with students.
As a client, I was invited to watch the final presentations of the groups working with me, and at the most recent presentations I started drawing a sketchnote (albeit poorly) of the trends which continued to plague each semester.
This sketchnote was the starting point of my talk, which (after a little interpretation and logical grouping) included five key areas of focus, a checklist of to-don’ts and a simple tool for story telling that the students could to structure their own presentations.
I’m going to share these with you now.
1. Do Great Work
Deliver your core objective quickly, obtain feedback and use it to iterate your solution. (The essence of agile.) By doing so, you can be sure to meet requirements and build a solution that even exceeds initial thinking, and most importantly have something great to fuel your presentation.
2. Everyone Matters
It’s really awkward for the audience to hear you speak about all the great things you’ve achieved (using phrases such as “I have…”), when you have a team of four people standing behind you waiting to present their part. Equally, when the project is in-flight it’s important to make sure that each student has an equal role to play, and that some students don’t work to serve others due to differing skill sets.
One of the best projects I was ever involved in had students without a specific skill set (in this case, the group had no software development majors). Instead of giving in to a sad reflection, the group took on the opportunity to build their skills and deliver the core project.
3. Balance Content
As practitioners of technology, it’s very easy to be swept away in the technical details over the life of the project and forget that the audience (be it the client, or others) have not been on the same journey. The balance between addressing the problem being solved in an easily understood, plain-English way, and also showing the audience why the solution is impressive is critical.
Also, I hate when audience interactions are forced and awkward. So does everyone else. If you’re making me put up my hand, there should be a solid reason.
4. Engage With Passion
Assuming you’ve been paying attention throughout the delivery of your own project, you should know more than enough about what happened to not refer to detailed notes when presenting. Certainly you shouldn’t need to script and follow every word. By focusing on what you know, and by sharing your experience you can connect directly with the audience.
You are the presentation, not your slides.
It also helps capture attention if you can find a way to instantly gratify your audience. To demonstrate this, I invited students to take a photo of the first presentation slide (the list of To-Don’ts above), promising that as they work through their own presentations in 6 weeks time they could use it as a checklist of what to avoid. The slide was only shown for a minute before moving on.
5. Tell Your Story
Take the audience on a natural and inviting journey from start to finish, but stay focused on making your point and not wasting time. This is especially important when it comes to any sort of demonstration. The demonstration should only show the core parts of your approach that relate to the problem at hand. In other words, don’t linger on showing off a login screen, unless of course your core challenge is to enable authentication.
By framing your story with context, you are able to synchronise your mind with those in the audience and provide an equal ground for launching into your problem. Naturally the problem is followed up with your approach (ultimately, your solution), and any demonstration would make sense to fit here. To close out, explaining the value of your solution in the context provided makes it clear to the audience that the problem has been addressed.
Given that the students would soon begin to prepare their own presentations, to leave them with something of value we began an activity.
In 2 minutes, students were asked to formulate a sentence describing their context, and another their problem, and then we shared a few of these for audience feedback.
In a subsequent 2 minutes, the students wrote a sentence on their approach and another on the value. A few groups were invited to share their story (as 4 sentences), and the audience was asked to identify the context, problem, approach and value. Valuable feedback for the participants to make sure their story was clear.
Bonus: At the end of the talk, one student asked How would you have critiqued your own final presentation as a student?
I found the presentation slides for that exact talk while preparing earlier in the day. (My Google Drive university account still works apparently, what great alumni benefits!) We opened them and started clicking through. Collectively agreeing with the audience, I answered with a question:
Notice how my talk this evening didn’t make use of all these fancy animations? 😂
