Speech at the conference: what is important to know
Every year we receive a lot of questions from companies regarding various aspects of participation in conferences. How to choose the right speaker, what are the most important stages of preparation for participation in the conference and how to read your report so that he will remember and achieve his goal? We decided to write a post, which will be a kind of FAQ for those who want to take part in SMP Conf , SQA Days , Analyst Days and our other conferences.
No matter how trite, first you need to decide what you want to say. And at what conference, which is also important. Because despite the fact that all the activities in the field of software engineering have something in common, testers may not be very interested in certain aspects of project management, and project managers will not always be interested in the difficulties of the interface designer's life. Although, of course, exceptions can and should be - thanks to such presentations, the specialists working on the project will be able to better understand each other, but choosing a topic from adjacent areas imposes additional responsibility on the speaker.
After determining the subject of the report, you must select a speaker. At first glance, everything is as simple as possible here: you need to send someone who best understands the stated topic. But here a very serious problem arises: not always a good tester, developer or business analyst is an equally brilliant speaker. Project managers are more fortunate in this regard, but they do not always cope with performances “perfectly well”.
')
There can be several ways out of this situation. Obviously, the two most simple ones are the “pulling up” of the skills of the speaker in the performances to an acceptable level or a similar process for someone who can perform well, but in technical matters. There are still non-trivial variants of the “Solomon solution” problem, such as “send someone who does not understand the problem, and does not know how to speak,” or “we will speak next year.” But these decisions will not lead to anything good - either the topic will become obsolete, or the performance will be so vague that everyone, including the speaker, will prefer to forget about it as soon as possible.
For a number of reasons, IT companies usually make the decision to send the one who is deeply immersed in the problem. This is partly due to the fact that everyone can speak about the same in them, but it’s easier for the audience to "answer" the problem and find its solution. Partly, companies are trying to encourage their initiative employees to travel to conferences, and speaking is not only a good way to tell everyone about the company, but also an opportunity to save on the entrance ticket (to the manager for a note).
Anyway, more often than not, it is technicians who have to carefully polish their performance skills in front of the hall in order to look at the conference as convincingly as possible. How to start the "victim" chosen by the authorities?
“As you call a boat, it will float”
After you have decided on the problem field of your speech, you need to sketch out the outline of the report and decide on the name. The easiest way to come up with a name is after the outline of the report is ready. The name should be simple and concise, reflect the essence of the stated material. In simple terms, the name should be quite clear what you are going to talk about. If you don’t think of anything right away, write on a piece of paper a few options that came to mind, cross out the worst, write another one instead, and repeat until you get what you’re looking for or until the paper runs out.
To better understand: “The search for truth in the negotiations with the download” is a good title for the report. “Some aspects of negotiating with a customer when discussing deadlines and requirements” are much worse, it is longer and does not contain any intrigue. “Negotiations with the customer” is completely bad, because it is not clear what exactly this is about and who should listen to this report.
How to write a plan?
When drafting the report, highlight the main points, boldly throw out details and discourse on the eternal - because any conference has a clear schedule, and in a short time (usually 20-40 minutes) you need to get acquainted with the audience, interest it, clearly state all the material and answer arising questions. Therefore, it is necessary to choose the most important thing, and leave the secondary for talking during coffee breaks and afterparty.
When the plan is ready, go to the mirror or to the webcam and speak to them in front of them to be sure that you are on time. If instead of 20 minutes it turned out to be 60, everything is all right - the draft report requires another iteration. Re-read the previous paragraph carefully and repeat your presentation.
It is best to hang out your own performance - you can even trite with a smartphone. After reviewing yourself once in a recording, you do not need to be horrified and throw the phone on the floor, or, especially, shout in the presence of your boss that you will not go to any conference. Remember that this is an alpha version of the report; in just a few hours of its active debugging, you will receive a report that is completely different from what you saw from the very beginning.
By the way, it is better to talk later without paper and not trying to memorize the text. You will have a cheat sheet and so will your slides in the presentation. By the way, let's talk about them.
Visual imagery
Maybe you heard that more than 70% of humanity are visuals? No wonder all the reports in the conference rooms are always accompanied by different exercises with PowerPoint or something else in the same spirit. The visual row during the performance is also very, very important.
Typically, the design of the visual series is made in the form of a presentation, consisting of visual images, graphs, codes and other slides. The text on the slides should be short, decorated in large print, clearly visible from the audience. Remember - text slides are not created for the speaker, but to facilitate understanding of the performance by the audience. No need to wedge the entire report in the slides.
When making slides on the first and last pages, place the company logo. In the end, the problem you were able to solve only due to the fact that it appeared in your company.
If somewhere you need screenshots, charts, graphs - be sure to insert them, and increasing as much as is required. The image should be primarily informative, and then beautiful. Although today the means of creating presentations can not seek a compromise between these things.
If you want to stand out, try instead of PowerPoint Prezi . This system of creating presentations, among other things, automatically puts them in a “cloud”, and you will not forget to put the presentation on SlideShare.
How to attract attention
Still, even the best presentation is not always able to give you what any speaker needs at any conference: feedback. How to make the hall respond to itself, ask questions, express opinions? It's very simple: you need to ask questions yourself.
Questions can be quite serious, and can be fun. Do not be afraid to look stupid - in fact, this is quite difficult to achieve. On the contrary, the more serious the topic, the more necessary are the questions that allow you to distract from it for two minutes. For example, ask what Steve Wozniak sold to start Apple (Wikipedia says it was a calculator) - and the audience’s reaction is guaranteed.
Be sure to give examples from life, you can tell interesting short stories - all this will diversify your presentation and attract the attention of listeners. Not necessarily cases should be from your own experience: a good case from Habr, Quora or any other site will also improve your performance, just do not forget to mention its author.
An important piece of advice for someone who doesn’t often speak in public: don’t try to speak all the time at the same pace and with one intonation, like a news announcer. Use the capabilities of your voice: lower it at the most important places; if you decide to make a joke, increase it. If there is a rumble of conversations in the hall - do not try to shout it down, a confident and interesting presentation of the material will force you to listen to the speaker, and the conversations will stop. It is important to work with a microphone - you can not keep it close to the lips or too far from the mouth.
I would like to speak separately about the prizes for questions from the audience. If you start giving them, try to choose a really good question and stock up on a really good prize, otherwise you will look somewhat ambiguous. T-shirts with the logo of your company may not fit the size of the person who asked the question, and even not everyone likes whiskey with coffee. So play what everyone will like - for example, iPad :)
The most important
Oddly enough, but just come early. 95% of all overlays can be resolved within five minutes, but five minutes before the start of the conference and five minutes during your presentation is like five minutes at an ATM and in line for it. Therefore, do not be lazy to check once again how your presentation works - the organizers, of course, will do it all, but you know your creation better and can notice more “jambs”.
By the way, on the eve it is better to go early - our conferences usually start early in the morning, with a fresh mind to always speak more easily and more pleasantly. As, however, and listen to speeches.
Well, we hope that these tips were not too boring and were useful to someone. We are waiting for you at our conferences with new reports fully armed!
No matter how trite, first you need to decide what you want to say. And at what conference, which is also important. Because despite the fact that all the activities in the field of software engineering have something in common, testers may not be very interested in certain aspects of project management, and project managers will not always be interested in the difficulties of the interface designer's life. Although, of course, exceptions can and should be - thanks to such presentations, the specialists working on the project will be able to better understand each other, but choosing a topic from adjacent areas imposes additional responsibility on the speaker.
After determining the subject of the report, you must select a speaker. At first glance, everything is as simple as possible here: you need to send someone who best understands the stated topic. But here a very serious problem arises: not always a good tester, developer or business analyst is an equally brilliant speaker. Project managers are more fortunate in this regard, but they do not always cope with performances “perfectly well”.
')
There can be several ways out of this situation. Obviously, the two most simple ones are the “pulling up” of the skills of the speaker in the performances to an acceptable level or a similar process for someone who can perform well, but in technical matters. There are still non-trivial variants of the “Solomon solution” problem, such as “send someone who does not understand the problem, and does not know how to speak,” or “we will speak next year.” But these decisions will not lead to anything good - either the topic will become obsolete, or the performance will be so vague that everyone, including the speaker, will prefer to forget about it as soon as possible.
For a number of reasons, IT companies usually make the decision to send the one who is deeply immersed in the problem. This is partly due to the fact that everyone can speak about the same in them, but it’s easier for the audience to "answer" the problem and find its solution. Partly, companies are trying to encourage their initiative employees to travel to conferences, and speaking is not only a good way to tell everyone about the company, but also an opportunity to save on the entrance ticket (to the manager for a note).
Anyway, more often than not, it is technicians who have to carefully polish their performance skills in front of the hall in order to look at the conference as convincingly as possible. How to start the "victim" chosen by the authorities?
“As you call a boat, it will float”
After you have decided on the problem field of your speech, you need to sketch out the outline of the report and decide on the name. The easiest way to come up with a name is after the outline of the report is ready. The name should be simple and concise, reflect the essence of the stated material. In simple terms, the name should be quite clear what you are going to talk about. If you don’t think of anything right away, write on a piece of paper a few options that came to mind, cross out the worst, write another one instead, and repeat until you get what you’re looking for or until the paper runs out.
To better understand: “The search for truth in the negotiations with the download” is a good title for the report. “Some aspects of negotiating with a customer when discussing deadlines and requirements” are much worse, it is longer and does not contain any intrigue. “Negotiations with the customer” is completely bad, because it is not clear what exactly this is about and who should listen to this report.
How to write a plan?
When drafting the report, highlight the main points, boldly throw out details and discourse on the eternal - because any conference has a clear schedule, and in a short time (usually 20-40 minutes) you need to get acquainted with the audience, interest it, clearly state all the material and answer arising questions. Therefore, it is necessary to choose the most important thing, and leave the secondary for talking during coffee breaks and afterparty.
When the plan is ready, go to the mirror or to the webcam and speak to them in front of them to be sure that you are on time. If instead of 20 minutes it turned out to be 60, everything is all right - the draft report requires another iteration. Re-read the previous paragraph carefully and repeat your presentation.
It is best to hang out your own performance - you can even trite with a smartphone. After reviewing yourself once in a recording, you do not need to be horrified and throw the phone on the floor, or, especially, shout in the presence of your boss that you will not go to any conference. Remember that this is an alpha version of the report; in just a few hours of its active debugging, you will receive a report that is completely different from what you saw from the very beginning.
By the way, it is better to talk later without paper and not trying to memorize the text. You will have a cheat sheet and so will your slides in the presentation. By the way, let's talk about them.
Visual imagery
Maybe you heard that more than 70% of humanity are visuals? No wonder all the reports in the conference rooms are always accompanied by different exercises with PowerPoint or something else in the same spirit. The visual row during the performance is also very, very important.
Typically, the design of the visual series is made in the form of a presentation, consisting of visual images, graphs, codes and other slides. The text on the slides should be short, decorated in large print, clearly visible from the audience. Remember - text slides are not created for the speaker, but to facilitate understanding of the performance by the audience. No need to wedge the entire report in the slides.
When making slides on the first and last pages, place the company logo. In the end, the problem you were able to solve only due to the fact that it appeared in your company.
If somewhere you need screenshots, charts, graphs - be sure to insert them, and increasing as much as is required. The image should be primarily informative, and then beautiful. Although today the means of creating presentations can not seek a compromise between these things.
If you want to stand out, try instead of PowerPoint Prezi . This system of creating presentations, among other things, automatically puts them in a “cloud”, and you will not forget to put the presentation on SlideShare.
How to attract attention
Still, even the best presentation is not always able to give you what any speaker needs at any conference: feedback. How to make the hall respond to itself, ask questions, express opinions? It's very simple: you need to ask questions yourself.
Questions can be quite serious, and can be fun. Do not be afraid to look stupid - in fact, this is quite difficult to achieve. On the contrary, the more serious the topic, the more necessary are the questions that allow you to distract from it for two minutes. For example, ask what Steve Wozniak sold to start Apple (Wikipedia says it was a calculator) - and the audience’s reaction is guaranteed.
Be sure to give examples from life, you can tell interesting short stories - all this will diversify your presentation and attract the attention of listeners. Not necessarily cases should be from your own experience: a good case from Habr, Quora or any other site will also improve your performance, just do not forget to mention its author.
An important piece of advice for someone who doesn’t often speak in public: don’t try to speak all the time at the same pace and with one intonation, like a news announcer. Use the capabilities of your voice: lower it at the most important places; if you decide to make a joke, increase it. If there is a rumble of conversations in the hall - do not try to shout it down, a confident and interesting presentation of the material will force you to listen to the speaker, and the conversations will stop. It is important to work with a microphone - you can not keep it close to the lips or too far from the mouth.
I would like to speak separately about the prizes for questions from the audience. If you start giving them, try to choose a really good question and stock up on a really good prize, otherwise you will look somewhat ambiguous. T-shirts with the logo of your company may not fit the size of the person who asked the question, and even not everyone likes whiskey with coffee. So play what everyone will like - for example, iPad :)
The most important
Oddly enough, but just come early. 95% of all overlays can be resolved within five minutes, but five minutes before the start of the conference and five minutes during your presentation is like five minutes at an ATM and in line for it. Therefore, do not be lazy to check once again how your presentation works - the organizers, of course, will do it all, but you know your creation better and can notice more “jambs”.
By the way, on the eve it is better to go early - our conferences usually start early in the morning, with a fresh mind to always speak more easily and more pleasantly. As, however, and listen to speeches.
Well, we hope that these tips were not too boring and were useful to someone. We are waiting for you at our conferences with new reports fully armed!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/250973/
All Articles