Being able to make a powerful presentation that resonates with senior leadership is an important skill to keep your career – and your organization – moving forward. Because many IT professionals find it a challenge to connect with business executives despite their technical skills, I recently led an IAUG webinar, “How to Promote Telecom Projects & Goals to Your Senior Leadership.” Here are some of the key points from my presentation, which is now available on demand at iaug.org.
1. Know your audience. Before you can start planning your presentation, you first have to understand how your organization works. That includes determining who will be influencers for IT projects, and who will be making the final decision.
Depending on your role, you might be talking to members of the C-suite directly or briefing your manager, who will be delivering the presentation. In that case, you want to be sure you understand the perspectives and personalities of the influencers and decision-makers. For instance, most leaders will want a simple, easy-to-understand presentation. But others might want to see more data on your project, or current IT trends before giving the go-ahead to your project.
2. Understand the strategic goals. Next, look at your three- to five-year IT strategy and see how that ties into your organization’s business goals. For instance, everyone is talking about AI these days, but you need to be sure that any new investments will advance that strategic plan, and that the foundational elements are in place first.
3. Survey your users. It is a good idea to survey users and hold focus groups in order to understand the current IT environment from the employee perspective. If you are moving to the cloud, for instance, you should determine what are they doing today with an on-prem system and how will the cloud improve their productive and user experience. This is not as easy as you might think.
For instance, we asked our staff members if they liked our voicemail system, which forwarded .wav files as emails. Many staffers didn’t realize that we had a voicemail system because they lacked the behind-the-scenes technical knowledge. So, you might want to have someone from the business help craft the questions for you and allow for open-ended responses in your surveys. In any case, you don’t want to take important things away from staffers– you always want to add features instead.
4. Present data that matters. Now, you are ready to start crafting your presentation. Sift through the information you have accumulated and look for the data that matters to your audience. That means getting out of the weeds and looking at the big picture: What do you want to do, why do you want to do this project, how long will it take, and what will it cost?
5. Focus on the ROI. Needless to say, senior leadership will want to know the projected return on investment (ROI) for your IT project. That might include hard-dollar savings, reduced capital expenditures in the future, or soft-dollar savings like staffing requirements. You could also include cybersecurity risks, which can pose a major financial or reputational problem for any organization.
6. Create a compelling presentation. Use the pertinent data and ROI calculations to build a clear and concise presentation. I recommend keeping your presentation to no more than five slides because your audience doesn’t care about the details – at least not at this point. You can use PowerPoint’s Design and SmartArt tools to add some color and life to the presentation, but don’t overdo it. Keep it simple and compelling, and you will be on your way to success!