Your Mileage May Vary
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PowerPoint can be misleading. Take the slide I saw the other day as an example. It said a lot of stuff, the primary message being reports can be created 10 times faster using the latest version of a particular BI tool. My concern wasn’t for the words on the slide; it was for the information that wasn’t there.
This idea started a brief but interesting discussion around the office that ended with a question our blog readers might have some experience with. So we’re going on a little tangent with this blog post and sharing our “water cooler” discussion about three things that might make your project’s mileage vary. Feel free to join in on the comments if you like.
Thing 1: Assumptions about prerequisites
I’m not chastising this particular vendor for their claims; for all I know they are true. I suspect they’ve made some assumptions though about the prerequisites. By that I mean overall “state of the warehouse” type prerequisites. For example, some automated discovery tools can rapidly build metadata but only work if every time a particular column name is used in a warehouse, regardless of what table the column appears in, means the same thing. That’s a reasonable assumption for some things (a column called SKU is a SKU and a Price is a Price, regardless of which table they appear in) but might break on general terms. How many times have you seen multiple tables in a warehouse that have a column called ‘Name’, ‘ID’ or ‘Description’? An automated “wizard” could get confused and think these are all the same thing and wire them up together. You then have to sort them out, and while cleaning erroneous references out can be quicker than creating spot-free references from scratch that clean up still takes time.
Thing 2: The Devil is in the details, and details get dropped from PowerPoint
PowerPoint isn’t a textbook. Slides are often just talking points, and when squeezing a list of complex information into a slide the details get squeezed out. Some of the most engaging presentations I’ve seen have included very little detail on the slides; the details came out in the discussion. But PowerPoint slides tend to have a longer shelf life than their accompanying dialog. They also get wider distribution. A request for “can you send me your slides” leads to a presentation getting e-mailed (You’ve seen these- Subject: Excellent presentation on {insert topic here} with a one line body, “This is some great stuff about {topic from subject line}”, and a 4 Megabyte attachment). There’s still value, but it’s not authoritative or complete, and decisions shouldn’t be made based on this partial information.
Thing 3: Information prepared for one department can be out of context in another
I always try to write to my audience. It jump starts the conversation and lets me use terms I know the reader will understand. It also lets me get to the meat of the subject without a lot of prefacing, shortening the conversation and getting an idea across before I lose the reader’s attention. But that also means the concepts presented degrade when a message intended for one audience (say, the BI department) leaks to another (say, Finance). For example, take the phrase that started this conversation; reports are 10 times faster to develop with the new version of software.
The BI audience knows that the act of creating a report involves multiple steps and that claim of 10x increase in speed only applies to one step in the process. The Finance audience might not be aware of the other steps involved and read “10x increase” as a direct “10x reduction in cost”. It isn’t just power point presentations making these claims. Industry magazines targeted to the IT audience share sensational headlines that everything in IT runs faster, takes less people, and can be virtualized, shifted to the cloud, multiplexed, multithreaded and distributed. The non-IT crowd may not know what these terms mean, but the message seems consistent; everything is cheaper and faster than last year so IT budgets can be leaner and project timelines shorter.
Where do we go from here
These kinds of claims of radical improvement from version to version aren’t new and they aren’t limited to software. The disclaimer “your mileage may vary” is universal in the automotive industry, maybe it is time for an IT equivalent. In the meantime there are a few things you can do when faced with broad claims about how much the world has changed. First, ask about prerequisites and stay positive. Stifle the urge to guffaw and instead inquire; ask simply what your team needs to do to get the most out of the new version. Second, ask for background information rather than a copy of the PowerPoint slides. The content of white papers, technical research and case studies can be dry reading, but their content can help you tune the message you share with your peers. And finally, when sharing news of great IT advances with people outside of your department make sure the story is complete; add information about dependencies and special cases that are unique to your company.
