Building a Presentation on Process Optimization

by David Tracy

Building an effective business presentation is one of the most important skills in the corporate world. The widespread adoption of presentations spans across roles, industries, and geographies. Whether you’re a college intern or a c-level executive, you will need to create effective business presentations that engage your audience and effectively communicate your messages.Yet, many people find the task of creating a business presentation a daunting task. For most, this emotion is due to lack of a strong foundation in presentation development. They are not familiar with the frameworks, methodologies, and structured thinking others employ to craft a storyline and then design the individual slides aesthetically and intuitively. This book, as well as others in the Business Presentation Guru Series, will help you gain those skills. Each book in the series will walk you through the creation of a different business presentation, showing you, step by step, the design and thought process. Each presentation will showcase new tricks and technique used in presentation development.The great thing about a business presentation is that it’s not only a form of communication, but also a tangible product. This is an important differentiator from other forms of communication, such as email and phone.As a tangible product, a business presentation will also receive wide circulation within a company and oftentimes be distributed outside the organization. For this reason, it is important for the presentation standalone document, such that it is able to deliver a consistent and intended message without a verbal track. A solid presentation should accomplish at least one of the following to inform (your presentation needs to be factual and descriptive), to persuade (your presentation needs to convince your audience to adopt your point of view), or to provoke action (your business presentation needs to provide clear, rational recommendations). Furthermore, as a tangible product, a PowerPoint presentation will often be a critical input in driving business decisions. As such, the presentation carries significant political weight.In this book, we will develop a presentation to capture the results of a process optimization initiative. Although the example we will walk through is of financial processes, the concepts taught and PowerPoint templates developed can be applied to any business process. This book presumes you are moderately familiar with how to use Microsoft PowerPoint (or the presentation software of your choice) and will not go into the technical details of using the software (i.e. click here, click there). Also, all displayed information is purely for illustrative purposes.

35 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 5, 2011

About the author

David William Tracy was an American Catholic theologian and priest. He was the Andrew Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Catholic Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. In 2020 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.