Reflections on a Face-to-Face Technical Conference

It’s a long-long-time since I’ve been to a face-to-face open technical presentation. By that I mean the type of thing where people book a conference room and invite people along to see presentations on a technical subject.

I’ve done lots of small presentations with customers, I also watch a lot of online presentations on technical subjects.

One of the challenges with small customer sessions is that the questions aren’t very insightful because the focus is very narrow and with online presentations you often don’t get the questions. There are also advantages to these scenarios; in a small session the focus is just on your challenges (hopefully) and in online presentation you can skip over the bits you aren’t interested in.

Today I decided to give a physical face-to-face half day technical conference a go.

I’m not dealing here with the technical content, I’m talking about the experience.

In many respects I have to say that this was a positive experience.

The venue was The Lowry in Manchester which I love, so that helped (sorry, oops, “in Salford” – people from Salford get very upset with being lumped in with Manchester).

The conference was technical so the audience was the usual mix of male misfits, scruff-bags, business casual and suits. There was also requisite number of women for these things – two.

There didn’t seem to be many young people, we mostly seemed to be IT dinosaurs like myself. Perhaps that was telling of the topic, or perhaps it was more to do with the way that young people learn these days.

I struggled with attention, something I’m starting to become worried about. My tool for the day was my Filofax for note taking; but I also made the mistake of taking my BlackBerry with me. Part way though there was a bit that I wasn’t interested in so let the BlackBerry grab my attention. It took me a little while to come back to the things happening around me. There were plenty of others struggling with the same thing I noticed.

In this instance the questions weren’t of any really value to me, either too technical or too esoteric, but they still brought out points that would have been missed by the presenter. If there had been less presenting and more questioning it might have been different.

The pace of the session was quite good, but there were definitely times that had I been watching online I would have used my fast-forward key and not really missed anything. What these times allowed me to do, though, was to think about how some of the other things would apply to my customer, and also to write down some actions so I didn’t forget them.

Was it worth the 4 hours out of the office? That’s really the $64,000 question.

In this case the jury is out, it’s a slow burn subject for my customers. It did give me some more ideas on how to accelerate the burn, ideas that I wouldn’t have picked up if I hadn’t gone to the session.

I can definitely see why face-to-face sessions are under threat but sometimes there just isn’t anything quite like them. I think that they are going to change over time to being less like “presentations” and more like “workshops” or “Q&A” sessions. Less PowerPoint and more demo and whiteboard. Or perhaps I’m just being a dinosaur?