1. Identify FIVE specific things in your slides that you could have done differently.
2. Identify FIVE specific ways in which you could have delivered your presentation better.
3. Identify FIVE specific ways you could have built your credibility further.
4. Identify FIVE specific questions that you could have answered better. What was the question, how did you respond, how should you have responded?

1.

• Make the context diagram more readable. The font was too small, and people had trouble understanding how the different input and output arrows functioned.
• The agenda slide was probably not necessary to include. We could have just told our audience what our agenda for the presentation was without including a specific slide for it.
• Slide theme was not consistent throughout the presentation. Sticking to a single color scheme would help reduce any distractions from our slides.
• Our last two slides (Future Applications and Landing Strategy) were not very strong, and they should have been our most compelling slides. For the next presentation, we need to eliminate any confusing wording used on these slides and specifically outline how the Lehigh student body would interact with our dashboard. This was a major issue with our presentation and it came up quite a lot in our Q&A.
• We did not have clean or persuasive graphics. Specifically, on our Solution slide, all we included was a basic logo from the Office of Sustainability and a text box. For the next presentation, we will find replace basic Lehigh images with graphics from our dashboard. 

 

2.

• I could have looked at the screen less, and made more eye contact with the judges.
• Do not repeat “as you can see on the slides”, and do not say “hopefully”.
• Display more enthusiasm and confidence
• Transition between slides could have been smoother – specifically between the slides that showed our dashboard and the slides that identified our stakeholders. 
• Try and let go of the nerves! It’s hard, but we’ll get better as we keep delivering.

 

• Having additional screenshots or graphics from our dashboard would contribute to showing the audience what steps we have already accomplished and make the distinction between past and future goals more clear.
• As Doug Spengel mentioned, having more people with a speaking role in the presentation could increase credibility by showing that each group member is knowledgeable on the topic, but this could take away from the flow and timing of the presentation on a larger scale. 
• Mentioning specific people that we have communicated with and gained feedback from could increase our credibility.
• Clearly identifying our audience moving forward and receiving feedback from these stakeholders would be valuable to include in the future, as well as for moving the project forward.
• It was suggested that we collaborate with other groups, such as the PlasTech team, which would increase the scale of our project and show interdisciplinary focuses. 

4.

• “Can we get a demo?”
  • It took a lot of time for us to answer this question, when really the answer should have just been: “Unfortunately, no. As of this week we have made some coding changes to the dashboard that have disconnected navigation to the map itself.”
• “Is this real-time data, or static old data?”
  • For this question, 2 people answered when it was really only necessary that one person answer.
• “What does success look like for your team?”
  • For this question, we answered in terms of adding features to our dashboard. While those are important to the project, we should have also mentioned the process of integrating the use of our dashboard into classrooms and into the Lehigh community. Success for our project is reduced energy usage overall, and we have to figure out how to get people to use our dashboard and care about the content.
• Not quite a question, but Khanjan mentioned that moving forward we should focus on identifying our customers and internal markets.
  • We got a little defensive over this question as a team, which was not fair to us or to the audience. It is important to recognize during these presentations that feedback at this stage is incredibly valuable for the future of our project. 
• Tara recommended the addition of a feature that would tell you what any money saved could actually be used for. Something along the lines of, “these thousands of dollars would pay for a new classroom.” 
  • Because this was more of a recommendation than a question, it was unnecessary for the audience to really hear  the long ‘answer’ that we gave. We should have just agreed that it was a great idea and moved on to the next question.

Blog #6 prompts (as a team):

1. Develop a storyline for your mid-semester presentations.
2. What supporting evidence will you provide for each point?
3. How will you boost your credibility every step of the way? 

1&2&3) With our CINQ team, we came up with this storyline and credibility :

• Problem & Proposed Solution

1. This is our problem statement: “Energy data that could influence and drive behavior change is currently too difficult for the student body, faculty, and university departments to gather.” We offer the solution of a dashboard that will make it easy, understandable, and entertaining for all of the concerned parties to access this data. 

     2&3. We will provide credibility for our problem & proposed solution by explaining how lack of access to energy data contributes to lack of knowledge and understanding surrounding energy use and efficiency on campus and explain how successful implementation can resolve this through informing students, faculty, sustainability office, and facilities and services. 

• Case Studies

1&2. We will be using the Energy Usage dashboards from UC Davis and University of Pittsburgh in our Case Studies section to show the successful implementation of this solution at other universities. 

3. Our case studies section will provide credibility for our project, showing that Energy Dashboards are a reachable, valuable goal to pursue at Lehigh University.

• Core Elements

1. For our core elements, we will display the current and goal functionality for our dashboard. 

2&3.  We will provide credibility and evidence by showing screenshots and explaining thoroughly how we plan on finishing the project. 

 

• Target Audience and Future Applications

1&2. We will present our target audience and their potential future applications of the dashboard with the visual aid of our context diagram. 

3. Our context diagram will also assist us in providing credibility as it explains each stakeholder’s needs and how our dashboard will support them.

 

• Landing Strategy

1. We will hand off our dashboard to LTS to maintain the server and call upon other CS students, ie. in a email from Heidi – the department head, if the Sustainability Office or other stakeholders run into technical issues

2&3. Heidi’s reputation as a department head, the CS department’s committed students, LTS’ experience with maintaining servers provides us credibility for our landing strategy.