Voice of the DBA

Tag: speaking

  • Boulder SQL Server User’s Group – Common SQL Server Mistakes

    The first iteration of my presentation on Common SQL Server Mistakes, based on the various things I’ve seen in the forums over the years as well as written about on this blog, was last night.

    It went fairly well, though not a lot of questions from the group and I ended up running ahead of schedule. Afterwards we had a nice debate on triggers, which I need to blog about as well.

    Good getting up to Boulder, or Broomfield in this case, for the meeting. It’s at Level 3, which is a great facility, and I’m hoping that we can hold another event there at some point.

    I’ve uploaded the presentation to SQLServerCentral if you are interested in seeing the deck.

  • SQL Saturday Advice – Speaker Communication

    Recently I was at an event and a speaker wasn’t able to make a session. There was a minor scramble, and the session ended up being cancelled, which is fine, but it got me thinking about what I would do if I had an emergency.

    I don’t always have the contact information for organizers, and it’s not easily available. In some cases, I’m not sure how I’d get in touch with someone. I usually have an email, but not always, and I think my emergency solution would be to “tweet” that I wouldn’t be there with the hashtag for the event and hope someone picks it up.

    However I think there’s a better solution. In the speaker communication the last week before the event, let all speakers know that they are expected to meet their commitments and give them 2 or 3 phone numbers to call for issues. Make sure those people keep their cell phones handy and can respond.

    I’d also be sure you have address, phone, and map links for all the locations for speakers. I know most should be local, but spending a few minutes including links in the emails will help ensure that speakers have a smooth event and are happy to come back again.

  • Speaking Ideas – Plan to End

    Over the years I’ve seen probably hundreds of technical presentations. I’ve seen good ones, bad ones, on all sorts of topics, many of which I didn’t completely understand. However a good speaker still leads me down the path of allowing me to connect the dots, or enjoy the talk, even if I don’t know exactly what he or she is discussing.
    One issue that I often encounter, however, is that speakers tend to run up until time is out and don’t leave time for questions, or not enough time. I’ll see the next speaker coming in and waiting, and unsure of how to interrupt. Speakers get rushed, and they try to slip a lot of content in the last 5-10 minutes.
    A suggestion that I have is that as a speaker, plan for 45-50 minutes of content for an hour presentation. I think the worry for most speakers is that people are expecting an hour of content and so you have to deliver an hour.
    That’s not necessarily true. I know some people might be disappointed in 30 minutes of material, but if you end at 45 minutes and allow 15 minutes for questions, they’ll be satisfied. They’ll learn something, they can ask questions, and if there are no questions, they can go have a few minutes to relax, check email, or network with others before the next session.
    Plan to end early. If you have too much material, look to cut things out, or build  a second, more advanced presentation that can follow on from this one.

  • Speaking and Presenting Tips – Bullets

    I’ve heard this before, it came up in the Tufte seminar I took, and it also was something that grated on my nerves at TechEd recently. I was in a presentation and saw a slide titled “Agenda” that had bullet points like this:

    • History of xxx
    • Problem of DIY
    • Reference examples
    • Basic structure
    • Enhancements
    • Security
    • Common Uses
    • Expansion to other systems
    • Summary

    These weren’t the exact items, but it didn’t matter. This was a BI course on a Microsoft technology, but a Microsoft PM, and he read each of these, giving a sentence or two about what it meant.

    HE READ EACH BULLET POINT.

    Don’t do that. Studies show that people can read much, much faster than you can speak. By the time you’ve started to talk about this, most everyone in the room has read the entire slide.

    The same goes for any other slide. People read it, heck, as the speaker I’ll glance back and usually read the entire thing in a couple seconds and then start talking.

    Give people information that’s not on the slide. They’ll read what’s there, so go into depth on what you actually want to say. If everything is on the slide, why are you there? Just send them an article, or move them all to Starbuck and hold a “reading” of your material there, similar to what most libraries do for 4 year olds.

    Give people information that’s not on the slide, and don’t read what is.