In the first part of this two-part article, bia™ Senior Associate Dave Paradi, shared some tips on presenting timelines in your project presentations (here is that part if you missed it). In this part he will cover some thoughts on the strategy of developing your presentation.

How to Choose Whether a Document or a Presentation Should be Used

In my most recent survey on what annoys audiences about PowerPoint presentations it was clear that too many business professionals are creating documents and projecting them on a screen. Just because you project it on a screen doesn’t make it a presentation. Documents and presentations are both useful methods of communicating, but you need to know when to use each one. This article gives you eight considerations to think about when making that decision: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/email-document-deliver-presentation-guidelines-when-choose-paradi/

Start with a Strong Executive Summary Slide

When presenting to stakeholders or executives, you may only get a few minutes of their time since they are so busy. You want to make that time count. I suggest that you start with a strong executive summary that gives them the key information they need right up front. This article explains what I think should be in the executive summary and shows an example of what it might look like: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/your-boss-asks-executive-summary-slide-start-heres-what-dave-paradi/

Structuring Your Presentation Up Front Saves Time in the End

Too many project professionals start developing presentations using what I refer to as the “Grab and Hope” method. They grab some slides from previous presentations and hope they can organize them into a coherent message before they must present to stakeholders or executives. This article explains why this method doesn’t work very well and how you can save time overall by investing some time structuring your presentation first: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/grab-hope-method-preparing-presentation-does-work-dave-paradi/

Break Free of the Bullet Point Slides

When you aren’t showing a timeline, an image, or a graph, most presenters default to using bullet point slides. This is the default slide layout in PowerPoint, but I think you can be more strategic in thinking about how you visually organize text on a slide. This article explains how you can group text in shapes instead of using the default bullet point layout: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/group-text-shapes-instead-bullets-give-slides-visual-appeal-paradi/

As project professionals you can inspire confidence in your project by how effective your presentations are to staff, peers, stakeholders, and executives. Using the advice Dave has shared in this two-part article to improve your project presentations can help.