The Working Girl Blog #33: A presentation to the bosses, or I wished I had some Valium To see all of Bobbie's "Working Girl" blogs, click on this link: http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/book/19261/working-girl-blogs

Sorry, no jogging blog today. Maybe later. Right now, I'm blogging about last Thursday.

Wednesday morning, my team leads and I put our heads together to make my project status presentation to some of the bosses which I had to present the following day. I wanted it in PowerPoint - 8 screens long: title page, agenda page, a two-page description of the application, a one-page status of the testing schedule, a one-page status on the remedial fixes, a one-page status of the deliverables, and a one-page summary.

Everyone was worried and said it was incredibly short, but I wanted the presentation to come off as spare and elegant and straight to the point. Though they disagreed, they did it my way. As they were working on it, I started gathering the word files, excel files and did a lot of screen-caps of the application itself into one folder.

Before the end of the day, we were all done. The reason it took so much time was 'coz of lots of interruptions (after all, work continues despite this little side project). I transferred everything to my laptop, and put a couple of shortcuts on the computer desktop - one for the presentation and one as a shortcut to the folder with all the files and screenshots.

After everyone left for work, I stayed a little bit late, studying and practicing, and trying to know my stuff back to front. I then went home and practiced some more.

When I got in the following day, Sammi said we were having the meeting in the small conference room. I about-faced and headed to CX-1, along with maybe five of the other managers. When we got there, the other managers were already there along with my boss, and five other senior-looking people in business suits. Gulp.

The boss introduced the newcomers, who turned out to be the senior muckety-mucks for marketing, regional sales, system audit and the VP head of BPO operations. Boy, did I need a Valium just now.

My nervousness was obvious. The BPO head reached over and put his hand over mine, and said I had nothing to worry about - they were just there to listen. Anyway, the meeting went ok - not spectacular, but okay. I got peppered with a lot of questions about the details of the project, and what we were able to accomplish so far, and I was about to puke from nervousness. The VP kept catching my eye and making patting gestures, signaling to be cool.

The meeting ended ok, and the head of systems audit made the final comment that the project was adequately managed and was quite amazed at how far the team had gone, and how far ahead of schedule it was. Before my smile could meet at the back of my head, the head of sales said that he's surprised at the effort being done for such a simple project. My smile faded with that statement.

Before I could recover from that, the head of audit said that he will start looking into our documents right away and will green-light my boss if our unit could begin using our templates as standard.

Seems my report was just pro forma - to see if it would affect the project much if I was indeed going to be pulled out for the three weeks I would be away. Just standard procedure. All that worry for nothing.

Anyway, the VP smiled at me and gave me a wink. He turned to my boss and said I should be encouraged to take Friday off. As they all filed out the VP smiled again and told me, 'good work.'

Everyone filed out and the others gave me slaps on the back and a couple high-fives before going out. I stayed and decompressed. All that adrenalin was hard on a girl. I just stayed in there for maybe a half hour. I needed to change my blouse as it was all clammy.

That VP was cute.

   

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