Useful advices for a successful project presentation
Let’s pretend that you are going to present a paper, an idea or a project to an audience. Will you freeze in front of the crowd, or will you manipulate it to embrace your ideas like it were their own?
Here are some ideas that could improve your “people skills” and help you act more natural when standing in front of an audience.
At first, to effectively present your assets, you must determine the best format that you could use for the presentation. Let’s suppose that the most popular choice will be Powerpoint, although I hate to use Microsoft products.
You must define your message by writing a short list of points you want to make, that the audience should comprehend after your presentation, and you should concentrate to those points in your speech.
You will have to consider that a presentation is usually 10 minutes long, plus the afterwards questions and discussions. You have to know that the time is your friend but also your worst foe if you don’t know how to organize the material and the amount of information to make sense to your audience in that time lapse. The best way to do that is to decide how much of your information is useful for the public.
After you have the final form of the presentation, although it may sound stupid to some people, you should rehearse in front of the mirror. This is the best way to notice your posture flaws and parasite gestures.
During your presentation you have to look at your audience and speak to it, not to the walls or to the ceiling. Try not to read long passages from your notes, because the people will think you aren’t well prepared.
Stand aside when you are pointing charts or pictures, the audience needs to see those things, you saw them already. Explain the images but don’t read everything, let them do it for themselves, you are wasting precious time on that.
Know well your presentation if you want to sound like a prepared person, be ready to tell the sources of your inspiration, and if necessary, admit that you don’t know an answer instead of making one up.
Stay relaxed, keep your calm, you can’t be persuasive if you sweat like a race horse and you wave your hands like a mad man.
Here are some ideas that could improve your “people skills” and help you act more natural when standing in front of an audience.
At first, to effectively present your assets, you must determine the best format that you could use for the presentation. Let’s suppose that the most popular choice will be Powerpoint, although I hate to use Microsoft products.
You must define your message by writing a short list of points you want to make, that the audience should comprehend after your presentation, and you should concentrate to those points in your speech.
You will have to consider that a presentation is usually 10 minutes long, plus the afterwards questions and discussions. You have to know that the time is your friend but also your worst foe if you don’t know how to organize the material and the amount of information to make sense to your audience in that time lapse. The best way to do that is to decide how much of your information is useful for the public.
After you have the final form of the presentation, although it may sound stupid to some people, you should rehearse in front of the mirror. This is the best way to notice your posture flaws and parasite gestures.
During your presentation you have to look at your audience and speak to it, not to the walls or to the ceiling. Try not to read long passages from your notes, because the people will think you aren’t well prepared.
Stand aside when you are pointing charts or pictures, the audience needs to see those things, you saw them already. Explain the images but don’t read everything, let them do it for themselves, you are wasting precious time on that.
Know well your presentation if you want to sound like a prepared person, be ready to tell the sources of your inspiration, and if necessary, admit that you don’t know an answer instead of making one up.
Stay relaxed, keep your calm, you can’t be persuasive if you sweat like a race horse and you wave your hands like a mad man.
Good luck.
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Written by: Liviu Moldovan
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2 comments:
IMO the worst that can happen is to bore your audience. A bad presentation can have a very negative effect on your career.
From a Project Manager's perspective, I found that having light, concise, and shorter than expected presentations will give a good impression about you and will leave your audience asking for more.
That is true Hut. If you can't please the audience and keep it up with you, you'll get them bored, and that is the worst thing you could wish for. Because it will make you feel bad, and it will somehow have a negative effect on your caree, but it depends on how important that project is, and how big is your audience.
Thank you for reading Useful Brain, we have some great readers, leaving high quality comments. That pleases me so muc.
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