Month: January 2014

Go to a conference and I can guarantee you will hear people complaining about sessions they sat through that bare no resemblance to the title or the abstract.

It’s not easy to come up with an eye catching title and abstract, but don’t fall into the trap of trying too hard, then failing to deliver on the day. It’s better that you are honest and don’t get selected, than promise people an enlightening experience and fall short.

The vast majority of the problems are not so much the topic, but the depth of the material. If you start calling something a “deep dive” or mention “internals”, you better have something a bit more hardcore than a few sentences out of the manual. There are plenty of people out there who can melt your brain when they talk about Oracle, and I’m not just thinking about the famous names who get on stage. There are a lot of really bright people who you will never see on stage and you will never know their names. Don’t short-change those people by promising something, then not delivering.

The opposite is true also. If you include words like “introduction” or “overview”, then you can’t start hitting people with in-depth analysis. The people that come to an introductory session will get nothing out of watching you prove how cool you are.

Remember, getting a room full of people who leave disappointed is far worse than getting a handful of people who really enjoy the session!

If in doubt, ask a few colleagues to help you rate the level of your content.

Check out the rest of the series here.

Cheers

Tim…

My first presentation for UKOUG was at a Special Interest Group (SIG). I was invited to speak by Andrew Clarke, who at the time was the chairman of that SIG. I admitted I was a complete newbie and asked for some advice. Being a seasoned speaker, he gave me lots of good advice, but one of main things he told me was to have a disaster recovery plan. As it turns out, that was one of the best bits of advice I could have received so early in the game. Andrew is a really nice bloke and a great speaker. When I met him again at this years UKOUG event in Manchester I asked if I could take a picture with him, because I’m such a fanboy. 🙂

Presenting can be a nerve-racking experience. Even when you have a backup plan, when something goes wrong you still feel like a bit of you has died. Without a backup plan, it would feel like a world ender. 🙂 Just like in your job, disaster recovery is about dealing with the unexpected. It gives you one less thing to worry about. I’ll illustrate why it is important with a few examples of things that have happened to me over the years.

• At an ORCAN conference in 2009 I was sitting in the session before mine, so I tried to start the VM I use for demos and it wouldn’t start. I use a lot of demos, so life was not going to be fun. Fortunately I had a backup of the VM, so I overwrote the VM and it started fine. A quick run through some of the demos and life was good. I got finished with the recovery about 5 minutes before my session started.
• At an OUGF conference in 2009 my laptop died, so I had to present on someone else’s. I was not able to run any demos, but I had a text representation of the expected output for each demo, so I could at least talk through something when presenting off a memory stick.
• At UKOUG 2011, I screwed up my demo VM before presenting about Clonedb, so I had to use my article to show what should have happened. That talk was described by someone on Twitter as “a mess“, so the backup plan was not all it should have been. 🙂
• At the Montevideo, Uruguay leg of the OTN Latin America Tour last year I accidentally dropped all the tables in the SCOTT schema as I started my demo. I couldn’t remember the name of the script to recreate SCOTT (utlsampl.sql), panic does that to you sometimes, so I presented the examples using the article I had written that goes along with the presentation.

Notice how all my major disasters have been about demos being screwed. Having live demos is a nice thing, but not without its risks. 🙂

So for peace of mind, you really need to consider what you are going to do if things go wrong.

• Keep a copy of your presentation on a memory stick.
• Keep a copy of your presentation somewhere you can download it, just in case.
• If you have demonstrations, have some way of replacing them if they are not working for some reason. Text output, screen shots or even better video capture of the demos is a great idea.

If you are lucky, you will never need them. If you are unlucky, you will be glad you made the effort!

Check out the rest of the series here.

Cheers

Tim…

Your presentation should be on a subject you have a genuine interest in. There will be a number of these tips that relate back to picking your subject for a presentation, but for now I will focus on this specific aspect.

Enthusiasm goes a very long way when you are presenting. When you are genuinely interested in a subject it draws people in. It is very hard to “appear” enthusiastic about something you have no interest in! It is even harder to maintain enthusiasm when you are presenting the same session multiple times. There has to be something there that gives you that spark, which the others around you can feed off.

When I look around at all the great speakers I’ve met and tried to learn from, they are all really into their subject. They are all speaking about something they feel passionate about. To do anything less than that is cheating yourself and the audience.

Check out the rest of the series here.

Cheers

Tim…