Presentations

["Carnall, Jane" <Jane -dot- Carnall -at- compaq -dot- com>]

My department (a baker's dozen of programmers, plus testers, QAs, support,
and one technical writer) has regular meetings at which one of the main
items is an individual giving a fifteen-twenty minute work-related
presentation. The manager is currently inviting volunteers for the next
meeting, about a month off. Presentations have (so far) usually been fairly
technical and accompanioned by jazzy PowerPoint displays. The idea is that
eventually everyone will have given a presentation, with the possible
exception of one programmer who claims to be phobic.

I am (cautiously) thinking about volunteering (better to volunteer than to
be pushed, or worse yet, to be ignored... :-). A presentation on technical
writing as in how to make a peanut butter sandwich, or a cup of tea, would
definitely not be appropriate. How to glean information from specs and SMEs
might be, but risks sliding into the personal <g>. That is to say, I have
thought about taking a spec and demonstrating how the data in a spec gets
worked on, added to, clarified, and transformed into the useful information
in a manual, but I don't want to tread on any toes in development by
implying that I think badly of their specs.

Would appreciate any ideas anyone cares to throw into the air. If you e-mail
me offlist <jane -dot- carnall -at- virgin -dot- net> I'll post a summary, since I don't
think it's *that* long since we had the last discussion that slid
resistlessly into the Peanut Butter Sandwich topic. 

Repeat. No Peanut Butter Sandwiches. No Cups of Tea. 

Jane Carnall
Technical Writer, Compaq, UK
Unless stated otherwise, these opinions are mine, and mine alone.