Presentation Management 04: Introducing the Discipline

(4 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

Loading...

Original content by AlexAnndra Ontra and James Ontra
Enhanced by Geetesh Bajaj

This post is part of a series on Presentation Management, and is the fourth post in this series.

Here are links to the previous three posts:

1. Presentation Management: Ending the Tangled Mess of PowerPoint?
2. Presentation Management: What’s Wrong With PowerPoint (As If You Didn’t Know Already)
3. Presentation Management: Visual Storytelling

This set of serialized posts is based on original content, the Presentation Management: The New Strategy for Enterprise Content book, authored by AlexAnndra Ontra and James Ontra.

You may agree with what we say, you may disagree, or you may partly agree. Either way, we want to hear your thoughts! Please do post your comments to make this post more engaging.

After looking at tangled mess that PowerPoint weaves, and exploring the concept of presentation management and how it helps visual storytelling, let us now look more closely at how presentation management can improve your workflow, life, and help you manage your visual assets.

The new discipline of presentation management can have an enormous impact on a company.

Presentation management takes presentations from one-and-done, single files and turns them into enterprise assets deployed intelligently throughout your organization.

Presentation management is a combination of technology and strategic thinking about presentations. We’re writing this book because we have been building and rebuilding presentation technologies since the mid-1990s, and we’ve helped companies understand how to use it to change their thinking about presentations and manage that content as they would any valuable asset.

We’ll dive deeper into these topics in the following chapters, but briefly, presentation management works like this:

1. A company decides that it wants to use its presentation content over and over again, rather than waste time and money re-creating slides that already exist but no one can seem to find. So the company engages a presentation management service to store and track these files and slides.
2. When employees need to create a new presentation, they log into the service, do a quick search for the specific content they need, and preview their options from a variety of formats, including PowerPoint, video, images and PDFs.
3. Then they just select the slides needed for the new deck. It’s like shopping online: You log in, browse for stuff, and click on what you want. Except instead of putting stuff into a shopping cart, they are moving slides or other files into a slide tray that gets saved as a new presentation, which they can then use in their next meeting.
4. On the back end, the company has a record of who used which slides and videos, just as Amazon knows that you bought shampoo and a book last week. That’s presentation management in its simplest form. But most large enterprises take the discipline further and develop a more strategic approach to presentations.

U.S. Bank is one example. The fifth-largest bank in the U.S. had challenges with its presentations that should sound familiar to any big corporation:

• Each department was its own presentation silo.
• There was no consistent branding across the decks made by people in different units, and the corporate marketing team had little control over who presented what to whom.
• Employees making their own decks were presenting products that didn’t exist anymore, or using variations of the brand that had long since been retired.
• On top of that, it was taking their employees a good five hours each to create their presentations.
• They were looking through a SharePoint site and network folders, opening and scrolling through random decks to copy and paste slides into a new, patchwork deck.
• Some decks had different backgrounds; others just had bad or old information.
• So countless employees wasted piles of time creating inaccurate, non-compliant (which in banking means risking the rage of regulators) slides.

Their presentation process, or lack thereof, was too rogue for a 150-year-old institution with about half a trillion dollars in assets. So U.S. Bank implemented a presentation management strategy to provide better branded content to its teams — and take outdated content out of circulation so no one could present the wrong information ever again.

To do that, the bank contracted with us at Shufflrr to provide a cloud presentation solution.

The result was an inspiring quote:

Shufflrr comes with a variety of controls, such as permissions, updates and metrics. Corporate marketing can give access to those people who are qualified to use and present certain content.

Each division can control its content for its team. If someone needs to cross-sell a product from another division, that person can easily be given access.

Corporate administrators can push out updated content, which ensures that old material gets retired and every slide is up to date.

Finally, thanks to reporting and metrics, corporate marketing can see what content gets used most often and by whom. U.S. Bank finally got real data about its content and how or whether it resonates with customers or others who are on the receiving end of presentations.

It’s important to note that U.S. Bank’s presentation management solution was not just a tool with some cool features that let it arrange and control content. Adopting the technology also forced the bank’s leadership team to think about presentations in a different way. Marketing could create a corporate encyclopedia of U.S. Bank content sourced from the experts in each division, for use by the entire U.S. Bank team. It was a top-down approach that still gives individuals autonomy and flexibility to do their particular job, and do it well.

The result: U.S. Bank corporate finally had control over the brand and product message, while employees had a faster, easier way to create presentations. Presentation management is a win-win for all sides of the enterprise.

That is the competitive advantage of presentation management. It unleashes all of the great knowledge within your company’s presentations. By employing an intelligent presentation management strategy, you are giving everyone in your company the ability to talk intelligently about any aspect of the business at any time, whether or not it is their particular area of expertise. Everyone becomes as knowledgeable and articulate as the CEO (and we’ll talk more about that later.)

But that’s only part of the equation. By employing a presentation management strategy, you are also mitigating risk and increasing productivity.

In the next post of this series, we will explore why presentation management is becoming more important now, with each passing day.

 AlexAnndra Ontra, co-founder of Shufflrr, is a leading advocate for presentation management. She has been providing presentation technology and consulting services to global enterprises for over 15 years.

At Shufflrr, Alex advises Shufflrr clients through the process: from trial, to content architecture, through the launch, training and then on-going software upgrades. She’s hands-on. She is a leading expert in presentation management strategy, implementation, and adaptation.

 James Ontra is co-founder and CEO of Shufflrr.  His 30-year career has focused on the highest profile presentations for world class companies.  His clients have included:  American Express, Bloomberg, Epcot Center, Mercedes Benz, NBC Olympics, Warner Bros. and many more.

His vision and strategy have been driving Presentation Management to become a recognized communication discipline.  James combined this passion with technical development to build Shufflrr. Presentation Management is smart communication strategy.

 Geetesh Bajaj is an awarded Microsoft PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional), and has been designing and training with PowerPoint for more than two decades. He heads Indezine, a presentation design studio and content development organization based out of Hyderabad, India.

Geetesh believes that any PowerPoint presentation is a sum of its elements–these elements include abstract elements like story, consistency, and interactivity — and also slide elements like shapes, graphics, charts, text, sound, video, and animation. He explains how these elements work together in his training sessions. He has also authored six books on PowerPoint and Microsoft Office.