Among my goals for this year is to become well-known employee in my company. To accomplish this I’m preparing different presentations and looking for some opportunities once they will appear.

On Thursday I provided presentation for my team workers on Domain-Driven Design.
As per me presentation went well, and I much improved my skills doing presentations. I know this at least because we have surveys to evaluate how the presentation went. And rates there were much higher than last time I did presentation on IoC.

I want to list few things that are flying in my mind after that presentation. They are also some tips to how provide effective presentation. (This is not full list, just associated with this presentation.)

DO

1. Provide the same presentation to your friend. It is great if you have friend who is working in Software Industry also. Actually we have another blog, where we just fixing which stories we made with short agenda.
2. Imagine your are providing you presentation right now, try to reproduce what you will be saying in your mind. I did this when way on the way to office.
3. Improve your presentation with restructuring it to the way it will be easily to speak to it.
4. Have verbose notes to each slide.
5. Print your story and have it handy on presentation. Just have. I looked there only once.
6. I kept attention of my audience with collaborating with it, asking questions.
7. In the end say that presentation was good. Some people could just believe you :)

DO NOT

1. Don’t wait for answers long. Collaboration with trainees i great, but if you ask question don’t wait long. Start answering yourself.
2. Don’t ever make people think that you think that they don’t know something. I did one mistake. I said something like “This could be accomplished with FlyWeight design pattern. Do you know what is it?” then we had a bit of silence. But, I’m sure that many people know that pattern. Maybe I asked not clearly. And my mistake “Nothing bad, if you don’t know, the FlyWeight is…”.

REMEMBER

1. There always be someone who disliked your presentation, maybe few. Why? Because he/she dislike you, but not your presentation. I can do nothing to such people. Just improve yourself and there will be time they will start to respect it (probably you will not have need in respect from such people).
2. There are always some pessimists. They always find something that was not really good. Just analyze if their observations make sense, and if yes do the best to fix your issues.
3. In opposite to those people there will be some who will rate your presentation all with max in a minute you sent survey for feedbacks.