Presenting Ideas To Management

By Dom Richards


It is tricky to run a meeting without experience, and it will change throughout your career. Why do you need to call a meeting. In order to resolve a problem or issue. Why do you need to sort something out. To gain insight into the thoughts of others and allow them to help you progress.

Duration of the meeting depends on your agenda, depends on how well you know the people and the materials you have to discuss. Getting the right people in the room is of utmost importance, without the right mix of responsibility and input the meeting will be a failure.

Presentation slides are important for the meeting but ensure you have the facilities available. If anyone needs to bring something along ensure you give them plenty of notice for it to be a success. Create an action list / agenda items / accountability for the key issues to be discussed.

Follow the agenda and create some visual aids or handouts where required. It is always important and required to discuss the agenda and stakeholders and how they fit together - essentially why you are taking these peoples time and what you want from them. Your position -Discuss your ideas for solution, and listen to the feedback from others. Action items - Capture all concerns and risks and rank them if possible, its handy to know what the major roadblocks and risks are for any project.

Management presentations can be nerve racking and preparation is the key to minimising the risk of embarrassment, failure or more work. With a positive spin, it is all about selling your great work and gaining support from those who can allow additional resources or steer the project towards where it needs to go. What does management generally want. To reward those doing a good job, remove risk from the project, allow changes ;to priorities and report on the successes up the management chain. What do you want from management. In general the project needs to be finished and you want support to continue on as you have done, in fact you are there in the first place on most occasions because you have done a good job and management want to share your success.

Trust of your peers and managers, this means we will needs to highlight areas for improvement and where we had difficulty. This puts a positive spin on something that isn't ideal, but think about if you don't talk about the negatives. Do you want to sell all the positives then be asked the hard questions at the end. Respect, respect is something that is hard to earn and easy to lose. It is all about integrity and proven capability. You know you are capable, the hard part is showing them. that's where the presentation comes in handy, show them your capability and talk about how you have influenced the outcome.

Presenting to management advice

It is often handy to start with time lines, the time line shows where you started, where you are now and what you have to go. You can then explain deviations from plan as you go, current status and future work.

Always finish with a positive and keep the important details as items to focus on in conclusion.

If there are touchy elements to the presentation , get them over with early, and allow room for discussion if the audience is engaged, but be prepared for the questions that will come. A good way to do this is read your presentation , think really negatively and brainstorm all the hard questions you could ask yourself. Nobody should be a harsher critic than you personally.

Pictures, management love pictures, the reason pictures or graphs are so great for presentations is that they provide a simple message and provide context.

In finishing, keep it simple (KISS principle)

REMEMBER - The managers are people too, they get nervous and they have to do what you are doing to their boss. Show them how its done!




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