During our last meeting last Saturday, all of the teams were able to present their projects and put their weeks or months of hard work for public judgement. Some felt valued, some felt underrepresented, some must have thought that the public didn’t understand what their team wanted to express and did not see how hard in fact they worked. And they were right. No matter how much effort you put into a project and no matter how big, stable and sophisticated your creation is, the public only has a few minutes to learn about it and evaluate it. And it’s how you present it that matters.
I don’t claim to be a presentation guru or the mr. know-it-all. But I did have some damn good presentations in my life, I took part in a few presentation-related courses, read some theory and I used to analyze the way others present ideas and track down the common mistakes that they make.
So what I would like to present here is a list of some most relevant presentation tips that I gathered from my own experience and a variety of other sources. This is not directly SOA-related stuff, but in any business or academic environment a good presenter is priceless. And we all agreed that our presentations last Saturday were not really top notch. So here it goes (and feel free to post your tips and tricks or links in the comments).
