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