How my last presentation was a complete failure

Date: February 27th 2015

How do I feel right now? Devastated is a good word. Now I’m relaxing though…

Yup. Everything broke 10 mins before the presentation.

Why? We never actually tested (fully) what we wanted to present.

Of course I panicked. I panicked so hard that my supervisor actually almost get agressive… For my own sake I guess.

I know time is the most valuable thing there is. To waste other persons time is just embarrassing, and of course that leads to waste my own time and feel bad about it at the same time one learns.

Oh yeah. So why is this a big issue? haha..

Just check who was there:

• CEO
• CTO
• Tecnical Account Manager
• 2 Lead developers
• Data Scientist
• SysAdmin
• Lead DevOp (my supervisor)
• Intern Fellow (we work together as DevOp interns)
• ………..me:
  • 15 mins late
  • Running back and fort to my office to fix issues,
  • Panicked
  • Quick made presentation . (2 diagrams)

After 15 mins, the CEO asks this:

“What the hell are we talking about?” “ Can somebody explain me what are we really looking at here?”

… Fak

I was out of words. Too many things in my head. Or just no things at all.

Thankfully, my supervisor has the gift of talking. So while I was trying to fix everything, he saved the day.

After some minutes I was able to talk and just added some interesting points.

It could’ve be so much better.

I gave myself the task to collect some ideas before presentation but we were so confident that we never made a full test or a proper presentation out of it. We wanted the work to speak for itself. It did. Sort of.

Well… This is just a pitty.

Good news anyway… They liked the idea and the potential of it (the live data monitoring project) so they will test it and see if it will be useful for the company. We’ll see…