Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Powerpointing away..

Hey folks!

Time has just flown by- I'm already in week 10 of my internship- 2 more to go..

While the excitement of going back to Ann Arbor and seeing my friends is immense, I am also very sad- since I had such a great time here in Seattle, with the MBA interns from the other B-schools and at Microsoft. I am in the process of developing my final presentation(s) and writing out a white paper documenting all my work.

I will be presenting to three types of audiences:
1) Exec: CFO, GM and Directors
2) Revenue Finance Group consisting of analysts, managers and senior managers
3) Directors from other departments who are interested in the topic of my project

As I refine the individual slide decks for each of these presentations, I am extremely cautious about my audience, the key messages I want to leave with each group and the level of depth/ complexity I want to go into. My mentor has been extremely supportive in providing me feedback on my slides do far. One thing that has really helped me is that from the beginning of my internship, I used Powerpoint slides as a tool to run meetings and gather information. While it consumed a lot of time, it also helped me develop a story as my project progressed and now I am completely comfortable with the story-line for my final presentation.

Creation of the slide deck early helped me in another way as well- as I met with business partners and other team mates for their inputs on my project, I also got their views on the way I visualized the slides. Believe me, I have changed every slide in my deck atleast 7-8 times now. This makes me extremely comfortable now that any audience, no matter how different, will be able to understand the slides as they incorporate the feedback of so many people.

As you can tell, I am dreaming powerpoint right now...and am proud to be working for the company that developed this great tool- Powerpoint! I am also super excited about the new Office 2013- I have had a chance to test it (or dogfood it in Microsoft terms) and it was far beyond my expectations! So watch out for this great product! You can see the customer preview on the site:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en

Now back to slide number......:)

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