3 Ways to Present a New Development Process

March 30, 2009

crowdone You have a brilliant new development process that will save time, effort and improve product. You have analyzed the current development model, tested the new process with sample work and have a bunch of brilliantly formatted graphs and charts explaining the the benefits down to the smallest resource savings. However, as soon as begin presenting your ideas and plans, questions and objections arise; derailing you presentation, and making your ideas look like a jumbled mess. Your audience is looking at the clock and you are looking for a way to escape.

Your ideas are not the problem. Your method of conveying them and eliciting buy-in from your audience is where you are falling down. Running an effective meeting is difficult. Running an effective meeting while explaining new ideas, methods or processes is extremely difficult. This is because understanding any new process, but especially a new development process is complicated and relies on a substantial amount of pre-work and effort from the presenter and audience. Unfortunately, many technical presenters anticipate that their audience has thought as much about the topics as they have, and that they understand all of the implications being discussed. This is a fatal assumption for an effective meeting.

Many presenters advocating new processes make the mistake of treating the presentation as a knowledge dump with an assumed stance of superiority. They function under the assumption that their ideas are unreservedly superior to the current process, and that they only need to share them and the audience will clamor for their guidance.

The typical presentation stages of displaying the information, answering audience questions and suggesting courses of action rarely works for even moderately complicated proposed process presentations.

  • Present information
  • Explain why it is beneficial
  • Suggest actions
  • Answer follow-up questions

    • Typically degrades into:

    1. Present information
    2. Attempt to answer half-formed or irrelevant questions
    3. Attempt to get back on track, and fail
    4. Lose audience interest and appear disorganized
    5. Have idea dismissed as not well thought out

    This probably because you are presenting a complex set of interrelated ideas that your audience does not fully understand and is trying to perform real-time thinking as to how the ideas relate to them. Planning and reorganizing your presentation will help to avoid this situation. Here are some alternative formats with their advantages and disadvantages.

    The Linear Cyclical Approach

    Pros: Simple to understand and implement
    Cons: Requires an extended period of time and appears very repetitive

    This presentation format is the simplest to understand, but requires continuous assurance from the presenter and buy-in from the audience. In this format you divide your process into sections and then follow these steps for each section:

    1. Present single element
    2. Gather questions about element, but do not discuss questions
    3. Repeat for each section
    4. Answer compiled questions at end
    5. Return to the beginning and validate each element with group, (to ensure buy-in) based on information and answering of questions.
    6. Conclude with next steps and a plan of action for going forward

    This format is repetitive in terms of the elements presented, and requires constant assurances from the presenter to the audience that the group will reach an understanding and agreement by the end of the presentation, but it has the advantage of being the simplest to prepare and does not require much, if any pre-work be conducted by members of the audience before the meeting.

    The Sectional Cyclical Approach

    Pros: Focuses attention on important aspects of each section
    Cons: Participants may not have a good sense of relation between process topics until end

    This presentation format creates distinct sections of the presentation and requires that each section be run as a meeting unto itself. It differs from the linear approach in that you cover each idea to its completion before moving on to the next. In this format you divide your process into sections and then follow these steps for each section:

    1. Present all information for the section with limited to no dialog
    2. Confirmation of understanding of topics with dialog
    3. Acknowledgment of how section relates to overall goal
    4. Details reviewed and questions identified
    5. Solutions or next steps identified
    6. Summary or Recap.

    This format requires strict time compliance, as certain participants may want to more deeply investigate a section than is productive during the presentation. It also requires that the presenter keeps track of questions that may be more pertinent to subsequent sections.

    The Sequential Procedural Approach

    Pros: Simple to conceptualize as it mirrors the presented process
    Cons: Can quickly be derailed by non-pertinent discussions

    This format presents the process as distinct and incremental sections. It has the benefit of being intuitive and seemingly non-repetitive, but can be halted by a difficult point in the process discussion and the questions, solutions and next steps need to be organized and prioritized.

    1. Present section of proposed method
    2. Acknowledgment of how section relates to overall goal
    3. Gather and answer questions
    4. Repeat for each section
    5. Summarize and recap at end

    The goal of your presentation is to make your meeting more engaging, interactive and focused. The purpose of the meeting is convince your audience that your new ideas will improve their working process. Whatever communication tool you choose to do that, if you can direct the conversation to the salient points and stay focused, there is a far greater possibility that your ideas will be seen a clear and beneficial.


    womanimage recent examples_


     .rss feed

    .reading