After explaining the approach and the difficulties I have faced by compiling one of my first keynotes, today it’s about to share the video and the slides for that very keynote at the IQPC Project Risk Management Conference late September 2008.

Looking back, what went well:

• The new slide concept (PresentationZen) worked out fine and was appropriate for the event. However, far more effort could have gone into it as not all the great features have been used and applied nor even tried.

• 120 slides fit into 40 minutes and still some Q&A time at the end.

• I felt very comfortable with the story line even if it is not my strongest habit.

• I loved the opportunity (Thanks to IQPC), I loved presenting in front of a great audience, I loved to take myself out of my comfort zone.

What didn’t go so well

• Even if I felt comfortable with the story line, I am not an expert in the field of why “The world is flat” and “The inconvenient truth”, therefore all the great stories that Thomas Friedman and Al Gore as the Authors of these fantastic books could and have to share are not in my repertoire and I can’t talk for years about these things. A headline, some side lines and that was it.
  Lessons learnt: You need to be ready for a topic, otherwise do not present.

• I spent a long time in front of Power Point to produce the slide set. After three days, I couldn’t see Power Point anymore.
  Lessons learnt: Take your time or delegate. Garr Reynolds (PresentationZen) says, if the presentation is important its worth doing, so go for it.

• The topic wasn’t probably the one that the crowd expected by looking at the program and the conference is a boutique conference and not a ‘real’ one with hundreds of participants.
  Lessons learnt: Do real keynotes just at a real keynote occasion.

• My conclusions “What does that mean for us as Project Managers” have been thought through, however, I could have worked more on them, but I ran out of time.
  Lessons learnt: Finish you storyline to the end and put all the effort in, don’t stop 200 meters before the finish line (if you do a marathon).

What do you think? How did I go? What would you do different?

 The Critical Value of Project Risk Management: Download

As I recently compiled a presentation for the IQPC Project Risk Management Conference I applied (tried to) some new concepts around the slides to be presented. My former slides all have been bullet point heavy and i was able to cover most of the content in 10 to 15 slides.

I wanted to do slides differently for a long time and just waited for a reason.

So i bought a number of books in the last 2 years, and “PresentationZen” from Garr Reynolds was spot on. In this post though i do not want to look at the whole book I just want to talk about the experience to put a presentation based on the described approach together.

How ever Garr is describes beside others (Handout as PDF) the following concept in his book:

Reduce the text on your slides to an absolute minimum. The best slides may have no text at all.

This may sound insane given the dependency of text slides today, but the best PowerPoint slides will be virtually meaningless with out the narration (that is you). Remember, the slides are suppose to support/supplement the narration of the speaker, not make the speaker superfluous. Yes, it is true that many people often say something like this: “Sorry I missed your presentation, Steve. I hear it was great. Can you just send me your PowerPoint slides?” Well, you could. But if they are good slides, they may be of little use without you.

As a result by having more than 50 slides, you need to find and identify 50 pictures that support a specific message. The picture has to be found, embedded, adjusted, cropped and referred to. All this might take time.

Garr recommends iStockphoto which is a service where you can ‘buy’ pictures to use for that reason, which might become a very expensive exercise if you need to buy 50 pictures. Another option is to use flickr and use the advanced search and narrowing the search to “creative-commons-licensed-content”. Most of the pictures can be used for non commercial approaches.

So I used that approach for my presentation / keynote to be prepared:

• I ended up 3 days in front of Powerpoint (after I put together my story line and the key messages I wanted to get across, so this time is not factored in the 3 days).
• I used 120 slides for a 45 minutes presentation
• after 3 days I couldn’t see Powerpoint nor my computer anymore

Once a month we are having our PMI Queensland Chapter Meeting, at the Irish Club in Brisbane CBD. September 17th at 06pm we started of with a great presentation from Richard Egelstaff,  a practicing IT Project Manager for Thiess-Services Pty Ltd responsible for the development and implementation of enterprise IT systems. Richard was talking about Project Management Eucation in general and he is looking at all the options we might have to upskill ourselves. Questions like

• What is Project Management Education?
• How has it changed over the last decades?
• What is available out there?
• Is it about skill or about comptence?
• What recommendation to give?

will be looked at.How ever some points Richard was missing or at least missing to give an answer to. What kind of Education a full time working Project Manager should undertake without impacting his job. We will cover that within the TJTV series as part of a personal short interview. Richard has done some great research for this presentation and looked at many current options out there, so make sure you take a look.

As always, the slides can be seen below.

 PMIQ Chapter Meeting - September 2008: Download

After being a little disappointed about the website presence of ISASA (see former article), I must admit, i was really impressed about the organised Business Lunch. Never been in the Brisbane Convention Center for such an event (beside unemotional basket ball games and concerts) for that kind of purpose it was fantastic. Great room, large, good sound conditions, wonderfull and gret food that we got served and, nothing to do with the venue, great organisation and an inspiring speaker.

John Thorp (via LinkedIn)has been introduced as 

an internationally sought-after management consultant with 45 years of experience in the information management field and author of “The Information Paradox”, that will discuss the latest international thinking on addressing the governance challenge. John will addresses and advises leaders of some of the world’s largest organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia-Pacific, including Fortune 100 companies.

Bottom Line, he is experienced, skilled, seen a lot of things and wrote book. A good way to start off with.

After the lunch got served and the opportunity to speak to your neighbours John started his inspiring presentation.

Lets talk about the presentation itself and its still (always interested in that):

1. He builds raport with the audience by talking and showing pictures about himself
2. He uses lots of quotes from other leaders
3. He refers to his book (26 final copies were on sale after the show)
4. He used numbers and studies to support his arguments
5. He uses pictures to present
6. How ever, the presentation went into detail and so did the font (got smaller and smaller and less pictures)

John is one of the guys where the presentation is great because of , which is great, the slides are just supportive, which is how it should be done.

Lets talk about the content of this 60 minutes presentation

I will just highlight some his key message that i got of the presentation

1. The value of IT is to deliver optimal benefits based on affordable costs with an acceptable risk over the full life cycle of the investment
2. If you do not take any risk you are not getting anywhere
3. The Evolution from IT went from Automisation of Work via Management of Information to the Transformation of the Business
4. From Run the Business via Change the Business to Change the rules of Business
5. Change is enbale by IT but the BUSINESS must be accountable and responsible 
6. OO + NT = COO (Old Organisation plus New Technology is a Complex Old Organisation
7. “My project is in trouble and i ‘hope’ its getting better …. ‘hope’ is not an option
8. IT Governance is the continually orienting and adjusting and managing an uncertain journey to an uncertain destination
9. Key Governance Questions to be asked (Are we doing the right thing -> Are we doing them right -> Are we getting them done well -> Are we getting the benefits -> start with the first question)
10. Less than 10% of organisations doing checks on benefit realization post project
11. Less than 5% of organisations hold the stakeholders accountable for project benefits
12. Business engagement and accountability are essential

And after that he talked about some details in the ValIT method (http://www.isaca.org/valit/ -  you download the whole framework on that site).

The juice that i got out of it is to understand from his view the role of IT in the organisation and how it has to change from being alligned to the Business Strategy to enable business benefits. IT is the enabler, not the driver and the business needs to be aware that IT and a tool is not the silver bullet to solve a problem. By implementing a CRM solution to understand more of the client will / might have an impact on the organisation as a whole and might even change their business model. So its less about ERP Implmentation in that case its more about organisational change.

John was asked a couple of questions especially around implementing this approach and thought into an organisation and he left out the real answer by talking about, yes, its a long journey and it would take 8 to 10 years for some larger organisation to adapt this approach.

So key more is to understand, are you more successful with doing it top down or bottom up, what is more likely to be sucessful and i guess there are several answers to it.

Bottom line, great event, great presentation, useful thoughts and information and a book that is worthwhile reading (The Information Paradox, by John Ford) that i got a signed copy at the end.

After attending the PMOZ 2008 Conference in Melbourne for two days, I was now able to convert the recorded Video into Flash and find a service provider that is able to host presentations that are longer than 10 minutes (eg. YouTube has a limit of 10 Minutes, even if you have a “Director” or “Guru” account). The Service i am using is Viddler that I will post separately on.
The presentation took place in the 35th floor of the Sofitel Hotel (the venue of the conference) and the actual conference took place in level 2 in the ballroom and other rooms. I am happy that around 40 people attended and made their way up. The room was pretty strange as it was like 25 meters long and 6 meters wide and windows where you had a stunning view across Melbourne.
So, finally here is the video of my presentation:

Please let me know if you have any further feedback how to improve the presentation of the topic (I know that the slides need improvement as they are very much tailored to a business audience that you need to convince that Health Checks are a good thing rather than an audit.)
Below please find the slides that you can download via my profil on slideshare.