Presentation Skills for Project Managers

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Presentation Skills for Project Managers

1-Day Workshop

Call +1 503 293 3557 or email for more information.

Description

Project managers often find they have endless opportunities to make presentations, from leading regular status meetings to formal presentations to executive. They need to reach a variety of audiences—very technical project team members, impatient executives, third party vendors, and single-focused financial managers, among others. Some of their presentation skills challenges:

How do you hit the right knowledge/expertise level for your audience?

How do you anticipate and address their varying concerns and interests?

What’s the best way to organize facts and ideas so they’re memorable and actionable?

How do you optimize visual information for high content material (avoiding “death by PowerPoint”)?

What do you do if your audience seems lost, confrontational, impatient, or bored?

This workshop is aimed at the unique challenges Project Managers face when preparing and delivering presentations.

Some of the techniques we’ll cover include:

Anticipating audience concerns
Delivering unwelcome news
Presenting and managing change
Organizing ideas in a sequence that’s easy to remember,
Designing slides to optimize information (fewer slides done well)!
Practicing so you can deliver clearly and better manage tricky situations

Benefits

This workshop enables participants to:

create and deliver memorable, actionable presentations
reach their audience, whatever their knowledge or experience level is
optimize visual materials and handouts

Who should attend:

Project managers and project team leads who are called on to make presentations
Meeting leaders, especially those working on project teams and leading project meetings

About the Instructor

Susan de la Vergne was an Information Technology manager for 25 years, a career she prepared for by majoring in English and Theater in college. Susan brings her interesting and unusual combination of education and experience to engineers and tech professionals who want to become better communicators. Whether it’s learning how to prepare and deliver effective, actionable presentations or how to write efficient, actionable, even enjoyable (!) business deliverables. Using real-world examples, humor, stories and examples from her experience, Susan shares immediately usable techniques in her classes. “Presentation Skills for Project Managers” is lively, practical, relevant, and participants learn dozens of techniques and practices that can be put to use right away.

What People Say About Susan's Presentations Courses

"The instructor was very well prepared. Good class size, interaction, and case studies."

- Eyleen Hernandez, Intel Corp.

"A lot of interaction and exercises that enabled feedback. Good pointers that are easy to do."

- Pat Thompson, Fred Meyer

"It's valuable to now understand the key components of a presentation: engage, prepare, deliver."

- Kirk Powers, Qualcomm

"I liked the use cases and the opportunity to do some excerpts of the technical presentation."

- Karen Jones, Product Evaluation Specialist, Sage Software

"Good focus on interaction with the audience, and tips on resolving common 'de-railing' issues."

- David Rogers, Product Engineer, Micro Systems Engineering, Inc.

"I walked away with the five key objectives in mind. I'm sure I will find those useful immediately."

- Ed Smith, Fred Meyer

Course Content

Audience
Keeping focused on the one question the audience wants you to answer
Knowing what “success” is for your presentation
Sizing up your audience’s various agendas
Communication challenges Project Managers face:

Navigating conflicting interests (stakeholders vs. end users, for example)
Accountability without authority
Delivering “bad news”
Communicating and managing change.

Preparing Your Content
Developing ideas, conducting research, working with abstraction
Structuring your presentation – best practices for sequencing and organizing materials
Triaging prep and practice—when time doesn’t allow you to fully prepare
Practical tips and techniques for coping with “stage fright”

Preparing Materials
Well-designed slides: Whether and how to use visual display
PowerPoint best—and worst--practices
Effective (and ineffective!) ways to convey / teach high content material
Meeting notices/invitations that bring the right people to your presentation
Charts and graphs best practices

Leading Meetings and Presentations
How to listen—really listen—during group sessions
Optimizing Q&A, both in-person and remotely
Handling “session run-away,” disputes, misunderstandings and more

Delivery
Connecting with your audience: How do you know they’re with you?
Effective – and deadly! – “openers” and “closers”
Using humor
Adjusting midstream – when you’re running over and you need to recover
Responding to input from audience / participants during the session (fidgeting, disinterest, irrelevant questions, etc.)

Other Considerations
Small groups vs. large groups
How long should you talk?
Addressing non-native speakers of English
Connecting with an audio conference audience
Handling criticism

Contact us for more information.