Concept:
Recently when I had to give a presentation, as usual until the very last-minute, I couldn’t spend enough time on it. As the scheduled day was fast approaching I was thinking over the topics to choose, suddenly SWOT analysis stuck me, which I had come across in Engineering days. Finally I zeroed on SWOT analysis as the topic for a completed Project. Usually SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis is done before starting a project for the planning purpose. I wanted to use it in retrospective mode, making it little different. Because SWOT can be easily applied for a finished project to understand the positives, areas of improvement and arrive at the take aways. When googled on the same, I did observe that very few people are using it in this alternative way.
Then just on the night before the presentation, I sat down to actually prepare the content. Then started the real trouble, I tried to look for the available SWOT templates. Very few impressed me with novelty but they were too specific to SWOT and I wanted to try something different. I started making a collection of the designs, which I liked. As I was browsing further for a better template, one particular design caught my attention. It was a board game template. It was a custom template with the famous business game played using dice. It was no way related to SWOT but I thought it would be great for my requirement to capture the journey of our Project and observed that it was also a paid template.
As time was running out, I decided to prepare my own presentation without relying on existing templates. I thought further and realized that I could represent the journey of our project with inter-mixed blocks of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. I quickly improvised it. As our project name, ‘Not Another Module’ (name changed) was an abbreviation of only three characters:N-A-M, I could form these blocks in the shape of those letters. Got convinced that the idea had some potential and started implementing it with different color codes for the elements of SWOT. Spent some time in making the text for each of the boxes interesting. Eg: Under Weaknesses, had to represent ‘Design Deviations’. So intentionally mis-spelt it. Also for ‘Exceptions’, placed the characters with different spacings. Getting the blocks into the format of the alphabets was a hectic exercise but I pushed myself to complete it. Finally the interconnecting smaller blocks between the characters didn’t have any text. Got an idea about adding the names of the team members and did it quickly.
Post this, I was satisfied with the output and to make it better added animations in Microsoft Powerpoint, starting with a blank screen to how these individual set of items get unfolded.
Finally the presentation was ready and could capture a lot of information in a single slide. Our team members were pleasantly surprised with this slide and as things were getting unfolded one by one, I could see most of them to be curious to know whats going to come next. Finally as all the SWOT elements got covered and the final outcome was visible, I ended the presentation by saying ‘This is how we built N-A-M’ ! The audience were thrilled and appreciated the preso !
Summary:
So by drawing the inspiration from the board game ppt template, I quickly adapted it to SWOT and completely changed the concept to building blocks and improvised it to the alphabets of our project and could thrill the audience.
Here is the snapshot of it. As I can’t share the actual slide, retained the generic text and masked others.