A business presentation is really an opportunity to tell your story. It is an opportunity to share your thoughts, ideas, experiences. The content of a presentation depends on the story you are trying to tell.

Delivery of the story itself or the style of delivery is entirely a different story of its own. We will cover that another time. On this post we will just talk about the content of a presentation.

This is a recollection of my experience from several years ago. I will save the reason of that exercise and that journey for another time.

The Challenge

The job was to present an idea about a series of projects around data and analytics strategy for a company with $28 Billions in revenue. At that time, I was working for a technology consulting company. It was an interesting project for which I was the project manager. A team of 35 people, very smart people in their own ways and their own areas of expertise, spent 2.5 months, did series of interviews with the stakeholders and subject matter experts from various departments and business units of the organizations, spent hundreds of hours in research, analysis and brainstorming to explore options and device solutions and come up with an execution plan for the company. The goal was to create an 18 months long roadmap and project plans to align the companies strategic objectives and execute a series of projects working with this client around their data and analytics requirements.

The experts produced tens of requirements documents, design documents, architecture references, reference documents, cloud infrastructure requirements, software licensing requirements, etc. Identified challenges, determined complexities. identified dependencies and risks and how they may be mitigated. Now the time has come to present the information. But the director of delivery had no idea of how to meaningfully present this data and the proposal. He and I spoke about this challenge in several occasions, and we were getting anxious.

Being who I am, I volunteered for the task of creating the content of the presentation and delivery of the presentation as well.

The Advice

I started looking into different presentations that my company has done previously, downloaded samples from the internet, but still struggled to put together a coherent presentation with all the information together. One evening, while I was speaking with my parents who lives in India, Ma observed that I looked troubled. I shared, rather reluctantly, my current challenge at work with my parents and Baba (my father), who was a great story teller, said telling a story is about having a good start, an interesting middle and a great ending. And they are all equally important and deal with them separately. All three sections are, of course, intermingled and interrelated but pay equal attention to each of them.

The Beginning, The Middle & The Ending

That night and the following two nights I spent several hours reading about story telling, story writing, writing scripts for movies and similar articles. I was particularly taken by Michael Hauge’s “Six Stage Plot Structure”.

With more research, I found more guidance material for the beginning, the middle and the end. Fascinated by the structured thought process behind story creation that keeps us interested, gives us joy and inspirations, I wished I was a novel writer or a storyteller.

I decided to take a little simpler approach for my story telling without the need for finesse of complex mastery of weaving a masterpiece. I decided to adopt the “5 parts of plot in a story” approach.

This gave me the structure and the flow I needed. While I was reading through the materials and examples and thinking about some of the good movies I have seen, in my head, I could organize them in these 5 parts quite easily. I realized that I too can write a story with this structure. At least it gave me the feeling of knowing what I am going to do!

The Plot

No matter what people say, my favorite tool is Powerpoint. Not only for presentations but also for taking notes, writing blogs, creating analysis documents, design documents, simple architecture diagrams, simple flow charts and may other things.

The presentation for the client was scheduled for an hour and after some mental calculations I decided not to have any more than 30 slides giving me in average 2 minutes per slide. It’s a delicate balance of content and flow to get to the ultimate purpose of the presentation which is “guiding and harnessing the imaginations of my audience”.

First, I needed to set the context and explain what are we doing and who are the players. [EXPOSITION]

Next was to elaborate on why, articulate current challenges, desired results and reasons for not achieving those. Dig deep in to the problems and show the gaps after our elaborate assessments. [RISING ACTIONS]

Then came what to do, to overcome the hurdles through either reengineering or reimplementing or implementing something entirely new covering all aspects of their data and analytics landscape which included technology behind reports and data, definition of reports and key performance indicators, data processing methodologies, data structure reengineering through new cloud based architecture, data warehouse and implementing new analytics platform and governance team and processes to streamline data security and analytics delivery. [CLIMAX]

Our recommendations included high level but appropriately detailed project plan for the audience to engage, explain without losing their interest and explaining the fair pricing points. [FALLING ACTION]

Finally opening up discussion for immediate next steps and action items to convert the plan in to actions. [RESOLUTION/DENOUEMENT]

Content of the slides were fairly technical but the flow of the slides with subtle emotional variation, the deck told a good story because of the careful arrangement of the plot and relevant information in those slides.

Breaking up the content was relatively easier for the Exposition and Resolution stages. I had to play around with the content between Rising Action and Climax and then Climax and Falling Action. Finally my story was ready.

Slide arrangements looked this :

I ended up with 40 slides including Project Title and Q&A slides. I timed while doing practice runs for this presentations. 50% of the slides were pictures or graphs used as an anchor and extra materials for complex contents needing approximately 2 minutes each and there were several needing only 30 to 60 seconds.

The Delivery

After that, came the delivery of the presentation. I was satisfied as a script writer of the story and now I needed to prepare as a convincing actor to inspire my audience and capture their imaginations while tactfully presenting my story. I will leave that for another day!

PS: Hope you enjoyed reading this. Please feel free to comment and leave your feedback. I appreciate your opinion and the knowledge that comes from them.