Power Point Rules - The Case of Format Over Content
An Editorial Observation
David Curling
I recently attended an international workshop on project management and was distracted from the issues that the speaker was making by the supporting slides. I have always been in favor of some support for a speaker to help keep the presentation focused. Microsoft Power Point is the favorite presentation support aid and thousands of slides are regularly produced using this extremely popular and convenient slide preparation computer application.
There is a dark side to the use of Power Point slides. Unfortunately, a current reality check has the forces of poor slide development and presentation winning
Power Point is simple to use and one is able to produce a good looking slide presentation that can be transported as a stand alone file. Additionally, set of web enabled ( html web pages that is ) can be produced and posted to a web site. If one has a Internet access and a leading edge laptop the presentation can be given directly from the web. Its ease of use is at once a great support for PM presentations and at the same time a huge hindrance to effective content exposure and communications. .
Before Power Point it was bind to have to trundle your overhead slides for a presentation and hope that there was a projector. Today presenters have a high end lap top which when attached to the ubiquitous in situ projector does a decent job of presenting the set of slides that must support the pitch. A set of PowerPoint slides in the laptop hard disk or on a CD ROM and one is all set to go. And the constant change of slide helps keep the audience's attention or at least awake. The problem is that technology has overtaken common sense and a useful presentation aid has become a crutch. Let me ex plain..
A Jazzy format is the order of the day. Each slide is richly decorated with extraneous and redundant background and foreground figures and images that have nothing to do with content. This presentation of format over content not only detracts from the presentation but leads to confusion as to what is the content. My colleague argues that if there is more than seven bullets then audience is lost in detail and that is only if the bullets of presentation guidance can be discriminated from the content.
A presentation usually has a limited presentation time. A full half hour should be enough for any presentation. From a personal point of view that enough is enough and it is time to move on. From from that time on my mind starts to wander and think about where we will go out for dinner tonight. Here we have timing problem and a surfeit of slides that must be gone through. The presentation track facilitator announces the time limit, the speaker becomes agitated, speeds up the pitch until it is almost unintelligible and transmits nothing except the need to complete the set of slides.
Then there is the speaker who reads the Power Point slides to the audience. I have no quarrel with a speaker who wants to emphasize a point by re-reading a slide but not all of them in sequence ! The most egregious of these is the presenter who places his back to the audience and proceeds to laboriously read the Power Point bullets, headers and footnotes.
To move to the next slide the presenter has to break eye contact with the audience and search the laptop for the key to bring up the following slide. While there are remote hand held mice that will avoid this most of present day speakers break off to click on the next slide. This has a tendency to destroy audience contact and the "stream of consciousness" of the speaker.
The solution is simple and it is so easy. Prepare the text of a presentation and then turn to what highlight slides are necessary to support the presentation. Content is king and people are at the presentation in the first place for PM knowledge.
David Coursey highlights this in his Anchor Desk article on the problems with Power Point presentations "What's wrong with Power Point and How to Fix It": David says ..."If you make professional presentations, you probably use PowerPoint. The trouble starts when you rely on the software too much". David provides some thoughts on avoid that trap without putting your audience to sleep.
Why is a copy of the Power Point slides in such demand? Interesting question. Most people want the slides for future reference as they hope to recover and store the content of the presentation. It is a continuation of a bad habit to provide copies of the slides to an audience without a copy of the text of the presentation. If you must provide a set of slides then provide a separate set of bullets and full highlights of the presentation but not the lean, elegant slides that you use to support your presentations.
Here's to improved PM presentations. Be brave. When you are subjected to Power Point slide horrors make sure that you inform the venue through the usual evaluation sheets. Do not ignore these evaluation inputs by taking the easy way out with trite comments. Better still talk to the speaker and also make your displeasure known to the folks who run the meeting.
To the Power Point barricades ..
About the Author
David Curling is Editor of the Project Management World Today and Webmaster
of the PMFORUM. He has been a professional soldier, systems engineer, logistics
engineer, procurement executive, senior public servant and project manager
He is Executive Director of LODAY Systems Ltd. and provides project management
consulting to both government and industry. David has particular expertise
in the management of major international projects.