Saturday, May 12, 2007

Managing the Confusion - Teaching Project Management

It has been quite busy the last month which has prevented me from updating the blog till now. Actually, don't tell anyone but I'm supposed to be updating a PPT presentation that is due Monday.

Now unless your an accomplished teacher then this tale of my experience will be of interest to you. You see, the PPT presentation I'm supposed to be updating is the course content that I will deliver this upcoming Wednesday. I already have the content ready, and delivered it last month, but although full of PM wisdom, I feel that it didn't deliver a compelling message.

Yes.. there are lot's of people out there willing to provide their advice on how to make it better. Amidst the sea of free advice, I have one to share with you that I'm calling Managing the Confusion.

The premise behind "Managing the Confusion" is that people develop a fog in their brain that stops any information from sticking. Therefore you need to wipe the fog away from time to time if you want any new information to get in. The rate of fog build up is proportional with the amount of new information.

Fog Clearing:
Whoosh .. are you with me?? I just cleared any fog that was building up. Can you recall what you just read? I bet for the most part you can.

Now for the PPT (PowerPoint) approach. Clearing the fog needs to be done every three slides of so. The exercise doesn't need to be anything more that asking the audience what they learned. I find that if you can get them to move, then that stirs up the blood flow to the brain.

Whoosh... still with me.. great..
Another exercise is to re-establish what your telling them about. So come the third slide, start off with ... And here we are going to discuss...blah blah (keep the blah blah short) and then go right into.. and what do you think about this..

The gold comes from if you can get the audience to tell you things that you were going to tell them anyways, then when the next couple of slides come up you can say things like .. see, you already know this stuff..

Other points: Keep the slide content crisp and concise. Don't worry too much about expressing the wisdom of the ages.. they will feel much more satisfied by having an engaging experience rather than a class lecture. You will get the opportunity to express the wisdom of the ages if the audience is willing and interested... which will come about as they direct the content, not you.

Good luck..