Technical Communication – PowerPoint Critique

The process of making and sharing information clearly throughout the team, organization and employee is known as the effective communication which has clear message for entire audience and they will have clear understanding on the topic, product, presentation or any project plan. A good Communication and understanding is an essential tool for any organization and its team members to reach out their goals. Now, if we want to look at the technical communication which is the process of delivering information within a team or an organization effectively, so everyone has a clear understanding about a product, object, presentation or a project. As technology continues to grow and became advance each day, it provides many new possibilities as well as an opportunity to organizations as they merge and adopt the new and exciting technologies. If we are sharing any information to any Induvial or in a group, our audience should dictate the type of information we shared about the product or project, so our communication doesn’t get cluttered with information that isn’t pertinent to them or information that could cause misunderstandings of what we are trying to convey to them. Effective communication has more power to lead any team or organization to success.

While reviewing the PowerPoint of Cloud migration project, “The Cloud is Coming”, which the former software development manager created to communicate the findings to the whole company before I joined, only few specific examples have been chosen for discussion to highlight the importance of well thought out, and well executed technical communication. For the information being delivered in the PowerPoint, “The Cloud is Coming”, there are several mistakes that I have noticed out which I will discuss with my feedback to make it better.

As it mentioned, the PowerPoint created by former manager to communicate the findings to the whole company was dis-organize because the presentation would have scared entire employees since it contains reducing staffs in slide number four. It is obviously force them to worry about their job security. It seems to me that the former manager tried to make it high level presentation about cloud presentation and did not do his homework correctly. He should have taken his time and organized his Power Point Presentation well to present to his executive/senior team first and then once it has been seen and approved by them he should have present to the whole company. Due to his cost-benefit analysis included on his presentation it should not be presented to employees; however, it can be presented to executive/senior management only. The reason I said this because when we present some new change among whole company we must think of positive and negative impact of it. We don’t want to panic any division or employees from our presentation to make them worry about their job security. If we do not communicate or present things more efficiently or effectively then it will have really bad impact on our employees and they will start using company internet to search for another job.

In the Power Point Presentation, the content was not organized well. Every presentation should have a good content to send clear and effective message to their audience. The PowerPoint presentation was missing it all over and not in order.

First: the presentation should have included introduction and purpose of the presentation which will include clear and effective information about the new path for the company to best practice and lower data center maintenance and expansion cost. With the help of introduction on the presentation about migration of the project, our audience will pay more attention to know about what’s coming to them that they all can be proactive and prepare ahead and conduct some research about new change.

Secondly: provide introduction about cloud so the fifth slide “what is Cloud” should have been second presentation. Not everyone knows about the cloud even though we all have heard about it.

As a human nature, we don’t pay attention on the things deeply and seriously until we must do that things. The given presentation should have included some more information about cloud, so our audience has clearly understood about it. Include some examples like there are data centers which are running out of space; as a result, forcing them to build new data centers or pay more to expand their existing center. When we talk about cloud which allows companies to move their applications into their provider’s infrastructure and save the cost of a data center expansion.

Third: the first slide of the presentation “The Cloud is coming”, should be right after “What is the Cloud?”. The slide is more effective and powerful after sharing Introduction of the migration of the project and what is cloud then we can fit “The Cloud is coming” slide by adding some more information into it. After having clear understanding of the project and cloud, audience will feel more comfortable and willingness to know and learn more about it. So “The cloud is coming” should have been third presentation to better prepare the audience to understand the rest of the material presented; as we should assume that at least some of our audience and readers of the presentation have never ever heard of cloud and are not familiar with it yet at all.

Fourth: I would have put slide number third “Cloud Benefits”, that was presented, right after the slide “The cloud is coming’ so our audience will have better understanding in sequence. I will add good amount of informative bullet points that has good amount of positive impact on the readers and audience for their persuasion.

Fifth: I would have added “what does this mean to us” slide and provide high level benefits for the organization and how it can help us to perform our business strategy. I would rather talk about Productivity, Cost, speed, access of data, performance of cloud, flexibility in high level so everyone has at least high level of understanding of it. I would rather have purpose a different chart to show the savings per year on employee and other area without mentioning on employee layoffs and how much the cloud migration cost will be mitigated. This would help to relay positive message on our readers and audience.

Sixth: Once mentioned above steps are presented our audience will have good enough understanding about Cloud, and our project so next points will be “Why should we move towards cloud”. I will tweak the title from “why are we moving to the cloud to why should we because we want our readers/audience to feel like this is the beginning of the presentation or planning phase not the decision. The title seems like relayed a message to our audience/readers seems we have been decided and everything has been already done and we are moving to cloud tomorrow. Former Manger should have done better job and made his presentation informative and persuading to keep our readers/audience on right track. I would again point back to benefits of moving to cloud and add several reasons, so everyone can analyze our current pain points of the company with our data center in their mind and show positivity towards cloud project.

Seventh: “What is the downside of moving to the Cloud?” This slide presents the downside of moving to the cloud. However, management will not want to hear about the disadvantages of moving to the cloud without at least a plan of action presented to solve each possible issue. For example, in the slide it states, “Security concerns may be a disadvantage, because the company is reliant on the provider. What happens if the provider gets hacked? If the service provider gets hacked, how is the company’s data being protected? If the internet goes out for either the service provider or company, is there a backup plan in place? This is very scary for management because they would be held responsible for the consequences and possible trust in stakeholders.

When the former manager presented this solution to growing costs of the data center; they should’ve had the facts of costs to do business with a certain service provider, maintenance costs of cloud, data management, and a service level agreement available. The last slide, “What is Next?” presents an unclear bullet points that were listed. It has a very unclear message to the readers/audience assuming what will happen once migration is completed. Employees know that they will be receiving training which will be focused on their job roles, but training dates are unknown which is not effective for the audience. No plan of action is mentioned on the slide and its leaving the readers/audience confused on what’s about to happen.

For example, employees will ask several questions such as: Are we going to be trained before or after the migration? What are we doing in the mean time? There should be a schedule date showing on migration project kick off, a timeline of training schedule for the employees and it should break up into current teams, so a group of employees continue their daily work and then some receive training so ongoing operations work will continue without any impact of the training. It’s a good process to train staffs and still run the legacy data center until full migration completed. Need to mention that training for the employees which provides work coverage and making the transition seamless once project is completed. Should have added In conclusion, the presentation overall is not professional or easy to read.

The slides are dis-organized and not in the correct order. There were some typos and grammar mistakes on the presentation like “there” and “their, 15% instead of 15# which the former manager should have pay attention. He should have a good understanding about effective communication and the importance of the information represents in this presentation. The audience was everyone in an organization and it should have been the audience of senior management first. The former manager would have been done better job by tailoring all pieces of information for each audience group in the company. There was a slide missing after “what is next”. Last slide should have included with contact information of the persons who oversees this project so when there are questions come from any team members or employees from different departments to answers them. This way the audience receives the information pertaining to their part within the project; which will allow the audience to be able to read and understand easier.