Puleen Patel

Over the past two years of being employed at one of the five banks in Canada, I have had the opportunity to present to a review board on several occassions. These presentations are my opportunity to tell a story of the systems and their architecture. How each of the pieces within the project will work to meet the outlined objective and the purpose.

This morning I had the opportunity to make yet another presentation to the same review board. The material that I was presenting was well understood by me and I had rehearsed the story that I was going to be communicating to the audience. The material that I was presenting was very technical in nature. I understood the appropriate details that I required to tell my story and had planned to tell it as smoothly as possible.

Things didn’t go as I had planned. While the presentation was superb and good questions came out of it. The part that frustrated me afterwards was the few times where I mixed up my words and sentence structure. While it isn’t the end of the world, it did take a minute or two for me to get back on track from those few verbal blunders.

Keeping this in mind, I have decided to start going back to my old habits of making cue cards and writing my points on these friendly tools to help ensure a flawless delivery of the story that I inted to tell in future presentations. Cue cards are (and have always been) for me a great set of tools to help me remember and steer me back on track should I fall off it.

Looking forward to doing some more expertimentation and further polish my verbal presentation skills. If there are specific things that you do to help you deliver a great story during presentations, I would love to hear them. Please share them in the hope that I can do more experimentation.

Cheers!