You, Me and Dynamics GP
I thought a few folks might be interested in what goes on behind the scenes for a speaker at Convergence. Now that the whole event is over I wanted to give people a sense of what it takes to make one session happen.
The process started way back in October of 2008. The 50 Tips presentation was a hit at our customer conference, iSight and I received a survey from Microsoft looking for Convergence topics. I added a 50 Tips presentation suggestion to the survey and followed up with both my MVP lead and one of the owners of Convergence at Microsoft.
The topic was accepted and the real work started in January. We settled on a title and description and I made some changes to the tips to accommodate a broader audience. I started getting lots of Convergence related emails telling me what to do by when. Microsoft handled the Convergence registration and access to the speaker portal, my Convergence lifeline.
Since I'm not a Microsoftie or a long time MS presenter, I had to have a co-presenter and I was fortunate enough to get Pam Misialek, the Convergence giveaway queen.
The first pass of the PowerPoint deck had to be in by mid February. Pam and I talked via phone and passed around versions of the presentation until it looked good. A big thanks to Ross, Abby, Tan and Christina for their help in reviewing the presentation!
By mid-February I submitted the draft presentation and arranged for the presentation technology I would need and the related tech checks. That's when I started practicing.
A couple weeks later, the schedule was final. I knew where I was presenting and what the room capacity was. By the first of March, legal had reviewed my presentation and made a few minor suggestions all of which were easy adjustments. With that, the presentation was submitted to the graphics company that does setup and formatting for the conference.
Then tragedy struck...twice. First I pulled down my final presentation, post graphics formatting, only to find out that they had removed all of the item numbers and replaced them with lists. 50 tips is just not 50 tips if you can't count to 50 with me! Pam Misialek talked me down from the ledge (that phrase would probably have been censored by MS legal) and told me how to get it fixed once I got to Convergence. After that, my demo crashed. Specifically, the really cool Excel connection pieces simply refused to work. Ugggh. After an hour and a half of troubleshooting, I finally set everything back and rebooted. That fixed seemed to work. I had broken Excel, not Dynamics GP.
Suddenly, Convergence was here and it was off to New Orleans! Registration, speaker check in and getting the right presentation up was incredibly smooth. After that it was speaker training time. I was expecting a small group and someone with a list of typical speaking tips. Instead, I got a fantastic one-on-one session with speaker coach Montana. I got to practice in a room, she gave great feedback and we worked on pieces until they were right. Speaker training is HIGHLY recommended.
Presentation day dawned, as did my early morning tech check. Glitch number 3 showed up here. I couldn't show PowerPoint on one screen and GP on another. Nor could I use a hard switch to swap between them because of the room configuration. Instead, tech guy Bill would be backstage pushing a button to switch. Bill was going to earn his pay in my session.
Pam and I met to rehearse and she was fantastic. We worked out our interactions and Pam provided some great ideas and ton of giveaways.
Finally, we were up on stage and the room started to fill. We ended up with just over 400 people in that session and everyone was great. They wanted something fun at 5pm on a Tuesday and that's what we were designed to deliver.
The very first tip crashed. I hadn't reset the Journal Entry after testing. Also, a system flag I needed was off ,so other sample entries I tried didn't work. The audience was understanding. They laughed through it with me, Pam gave away swag, and we moved to tip number 2. After that it was smooth sailing.The audience was in to it and we ended up with great scores and half of the audience submitted evaluations.
That's when I discovered the high of evaluations. People should really be careful with evals. They make speakers manic depressive. When you read good comments you get high, then a negative comment makes you crash. You have to learn to process all of it to make yourself a better speaker. Sometimes you adjust for the negatives and sometimes you just realize you won't reach everyone.
Most of the people got what we were trying to do. This wasn't a deep dive but it wasn't fluffy. It was all about the little things that make life easier every day. But like anything, a few people didn't get it. A few of the comments were along the lines of "they should do fewer tips" or "they should go slower". It's 50 tips in 50 minutes. I can't go slow!
All in all, the comments were fantastic so I thought I would drop a few in here.
This session rocked. I picked up at LEAST 25 tips I did not know to take back
and use right away in my organization.
This session alone is going to save me enough time to make the conference worth
the cost.
I have been working with Dynamics GP since version 2.04. I knew alot of what
they said - but I learned a few new things.
If you've been working with GP since version 2.04 and you learned stuff, we did something right!
The nerves returned on Thursday for session 2 but everything worked and the session 2 went really well. We were a little over confident though and went about 2 minutes long. Managing a hard switch between the PowerPoint and GP was tougher than I thought it would be. We did get better scores though so I have no complaints.
The speaking process was actually really smooth and now that I've been through it once, I would happily do it again.
Make sure that you watch the new official Dynamics GP blog where my co-presenter Pam will be doing some blogging too!
The process started way back in October of 2008. The 50 Tips presentation was a hit at our customer conference, iSight and I received a survey from Microsoft looking for Convergence topics. I added a 50 Tips presentation suggestion to the survey and followed up with both my MVP lead and one of the owners of Convergence at Microsoft.
The topic was accepted and the real work started in January. We settled on a title and description and I made some changes to the tips to accommodate a broader audience. I started getting lots of Convergence related emails telling me what to do by when. Microsoft handled the Convergence registration and access to the speaker portal, my Convergence lifeline.
Since I'm not a Microsoftie or a long time MS presenter, I had to have a co-presenter and I was fortunate enough to get Pam Misialek, the Convergence giveaway queen.
The first pass of the PowerPoint deck had to be in by mid February. Pam and I talked via phone and passed around versions of the presentation until it looked good. A big thanks to Ross, Abby, Tan and Christina for their help in reviewing the presentation!
By mid-February I submitted the draft presentation and arranged for the presentation technology I would need and the related tech checks. That's when I started practicing.
A couple weeks later, the schedule was final. I knew where I was presenting and what the room capacity was. By the first of March, legal had reviewed my presentation and made a few minor suggestions all of which were easy adjustments. With that, the presentation was submitted to the graphics company that does setup and formatting for the conference.
Then tragedy struck...twice. First I pulled down my final presentation, post graphics formatting, only to find out that they had removed all of the item numbers and replaced them with lists. 50 tips is just not 50 tips if you can't count to 50 with me! Pam Misialek talked me down from the ledge (that phrase would probably have been censored by MS legal) and told me how to get it fixed once I got to Convergence. After that, my demo crashed. Specifically, the really cool Excel connection pieces simply refused to work. Ugggh. After an hour and a half of troubleshooting, I finally set everything back and rebooted. That fixed seemed to work. I had broken Excel, not Dynamics GP.
Suddenly, Convergence was here and it was off to New Orleans! Registration, speaker check in and getting the right presentation up was incredibly smooth. After that it was speaker training time. I was expecting a small group and someone with a list of typical speaking tips. Instead, I got a fantastic one-on-one session with speaker coach Montana. I got to practice in a room, she gave great feedback and we worked on pieces until they were right. Speaker training is HIGHLY recommended.
Presentation day dawned, as did my early morning tech check. Glitch number 3 showed up here. I couldn't show PowerPoint on one screen and GP on another. Nor could I use a hard switch to swap between them because of the room configuration. Instead, tech guy Bill would be backstage pushing a button to switch. Bill was going to earn his pay in my session.
Pam and I met to rehearse and she was fantastic. We worked out our interactions and Pam provided some great ideas and ton of giveaways.
Finally, we were up on stage and the room started to fill. We ended up with just over 400 people in that session and everyone was great. They wanted something fun at 5pm on a Tuesday and that's what we were designed to deliver.
The very first tip crashed. I hadn't reset the Journal Entry after testing. Also, a system flag I needed was off ,so other sample entries I tried didn't work. The audience was understanding. They laughed through it with me, Pam gave away swag, and we moved to tip number 2. After that it was smooth sailing.The audience was in to it and we ended up with great scores and half of the audience submitted evaluations.
That's when I discovered the high of evaluations. People should really be careful with evals. They make speakers manic depressive. When you read good comments you get high, then a negative comment makes you crash. You have to learn to process all of it to make yourself a better speaker. Sometimes you adjust for the negatives and sometimes you just realize you won't reach everyone.
Most of the people got what we were trying to do. This wasn't a deep dive but it wasn't fluffy. It was all about the little things that make life easier every day. But like anything, a few people didn't get it. A few of the comments were along the lines of "they should do fewer tips" or "they should go slower". It's 50 tips in 50 minutes. I can't go slow!
All in all, the comments were fantastic so I thought I would drop a few in here.
This session rocked. I picked up at LEAST 25 tips I did not know to take back
and use right away in my organization.
This session alone is going to save me enough time to make the conference worth
the cost.
I have been working with Dynamics GP since version 2.04. I knew alot of what
they said - but I learned a few new things.
If you've been working with GP since version 2.04 and you learned stuff, we did something right!
The nerves returned on Thursday for session 2 but everything worked and the session 2 went really well. We were a little over confident though and went about 2 minutes long. Managing a hard switch between the PowerPoint and GP was tougher than I thought it would be. We did get better scores though so I have no complaints.
The speaking process was actually really smooth and now that I've been through it once, I would happily do it again.
Make sure that you watch the new official Dynamics GP blog where my co-presenter Pam will be doing some blogging too!
