Quite often I am fortunate enough to have an opportunity to participate on panel presentations at conferences and various seminars in the technology industry. I have noticed a trend lately. Panel participants are not self-aware of their actions on stage and have obviously not had any training on presentation skills. Here are a few items to keep in mind when participating on a panel at a conference. I have witnessed every one of these from fellow partipants in front of large groups.
1. Time management. If you are alloted a specific amount of time to present as part of the panel, stick to it. Running over your time is rude to both the fellow presenters and the audience.
2. Cell phones. This may seem very obvious but I have seen multiple presenters check their cell phones or smartphones during the panel presentation. If you cannot afford to turn your phone off for the one-hour presentation then you are probably too busy to be presenting anyway.
3. Habits. The following actions are unacceptable: scratching your nose, adjusting your tie, constantly checking the time on your wrist watch, picking at your ears with a pen or paper clip, cleaning your glasses, and e-mailing on your blackberry. Yes, I have actually see all of these happen at presentations. Nervous habits come forward at the worst possible time. Recognize these issues before the presentation and be mindful of what you are doing while you are in front of the audience.
4. Where to look. When you are participating on a panel discussion you should primarily look at the person speaking. While this may be odd due to positioning of the seats at the table always try to show respect for the person speaking by looking their way and acting interested.
5. Be prepared to give credit to the person before you. If you are about to speak and the person before you essentially says the same thing as you are about to say then acknowledge that and allow the discussion to move on. You do not need to restate everything the prior person said in your own words. The audience will appreciate that you kept the discussion moving onto other topics.
As I am typing this tropical storm Fay is approaching the Southwest coast of Florida. It looks like the storm will hit around the Ft. Myers area but there is still some uncertainty in the storm track. We have been working hard since yesterday preparing for her arrival. The department developed plans last year that serve as the checklist of activities starting at t-minus 96 hours. For example, backup tapes for certain systems are being shipped to Colorado each day for our cold site data center recovery plan in the event of a worst case scenario. Action teams are in place at the data center and on stand-by at home. Communication trees are established and system changes within our 400+ applications have been frozen. This is the first storm that we have dealt with since we moved into our new data center in October 2007. The data center is a tier III data center and houses 537 servers (and growing) and over 400 applications (and growing). Being in the new data center is a big relief during times like this when storms are approaching. In addition to the primary data center which is well protected we have a co-located data center on our network backbone within 20 miles that allows us to recover key data and domain controllers very quickly. Overall, the technical and DR team has done an exceptional job preparing us for a disaster. We still have a long way to go but we are making solid progress every year and have plans in place to ensure we can take care of our customers.
