An ITIL project in the real world

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Preparing the presentation to our sponsors about "Incident Management Basics"

OK. The workshops we did to find out how we could improve our situation with Incident Management were fruitful. But now I had to prepare the "*รง%## presentation of these basics to our sponsors. The participants said we could just throw the whole project away if the sponsors did not stand for the approach, and push themselves the message to their direct reports. Talking of a challenge!

So I went on, prepared some kind of summary of the workshop, and thought that would be good enough. Nope. I presented that to couple of colleagues, and consultants who were walking around. "Too many details" they said. "What's the point? What do you expect from the sponsors with this? What is the impact on the organization? What's the plan?" Duh!

Here's how I fixed it (thanks to the help of one of these Cambridge Technology Partners consultant):

- trimmed some leaves, and keep them as backup slides (that was the easy part)

- tried to have logic like: facts => findings => recommendations => effort estimates => conclusions. Actually that was quite effective! The hardest part was to recover the facts, findings and benefits, while I had only laid down the recommendations at first, and while trying to keep the spirit of the workshop participants, so they still back me up at the presentation!

- finally understood the concept of have a Title, then a summary, then the rest of the slide. I thought that I was doing a great job with this summary:



I am a fan of ITIL
The reasons why I like ITIL
- ITIL is cool
- ITIL is hot
- ITIL is fun
- Cool people like ITIL






While a more useful summary would rather be:


I am a fan of ITIL
I like it because it is cool, hot and fun, and I'm cool too
- ITIL is cool
- ITIL is hot
- ITIL is fun
- Cool people like ITIL



The great thing with the correct summary, is that people can stick with just reading the title and the summary sentence. You can go on with details below the summary, but you have to make your point in a few words right at the beginning of the slide. Highly efficient! Guess I'll have to do that in my blog now!

Now I'm checking out that the presentation is still reflecting the participants intentions. First echoes on the reviewed presentation are excellent... On Tuesday, we'll be presenting it to two of our sponsors...

1 Comments:

  • I would like to add my little drop. Just think on the sequence

    * Actual Situation
    * Findings
    * Recommendantions and benefits for each one
    * Priority (remember the quick wins)
    * Effort

    Try to prioritize your recommendations based on balancing how much critical it is and how much benefits will the company get from it.

    Hope this helps, and good luck with your presentation. Please, dont' forget to keep the slides simple and clear, not too much text and clear graphics.

    By Blogger Antonio Valle, at 3:39 PM  

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