Hard Choices at TechED

Well I knew that presenting at TechED would be hard but this week has been one of the hardest I have ever faced. During the week we had been struggling with getting the demo of the prerelease ESB working. We had practiced a good two person rotating handover presentation which looked and ran great and all in all we were generally ok, until Ewan received a phone call from his family and had to leave for home and would not be able to present.

At this point the TechED crew offered an option to cancel the session. I had the choice of walking away with no credibility loss or trying to get the session reworked in the few hours to run as a single person presentation. I felt it was better to present than not.

While I prepare for many things, having no co-speaker wasn't one, however Richard stepped in at the last minute and ran the demo that we had managed to get going and did a truly brilliant job. I think that at best I provided a serviceable presentation trying to run both halves of the prepared talk, the feedback on the day was quite positive but the anonymous feedback wasn't as kind. I missed many of my cues from the two person run through and as a result I missed about 30% of my material and I think the presentation suffered.

As a final kick in the teeth, the remote clicker failed which just made me look amateurish  (I had offered to use my own but I was not allowed).

In previous discussions with Richard we had always agreed to do two half sessions which is a nice way to run a presentation and has always  done well for both of us. In future I'll shy away from a rotating presentation and stick to full or half presentations, no matter how much pressure is applied.

Now if I had thought about it, I would have copied Rob Miles by running his presentation at our community events as the dry run for the material.

I think the lessons learned are run a session before at the local community which due to speaker distance didn't pan out, run only full or half sessions.

On an upside the ESB Guidance has released and I will (when I get back from Barcelona), start a series of implementation notes.

If you do have any comments from TechED I am interested to hear them.

b.

Update: I spoke to Dave McMahon the day after and he gave some good advice on the day, thanks Dave. Dave was ranked as the 7th top speaker at TechED which is not surprising as he is a great speaker.

Technorati tags: TechED 2007 Developer, Barcelona