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When publishing blog or Road Test report, do you know your audience ?

robogary

After doing a powerpoint presentation for a large online meeting to a global audience of mostly engineers and engineering leadership of various departments, my boss assembled me and my team into his office for a chat.

He asked to give ourselves a grade of our presentation. We gave ourselves As, Bs, maybe even a C thrown in. 

The boss said "I generously give you folks a D."

He continued that the presentation included far too much detail on how much time was spent troubleshooting, collecting data, and other related analysis issues and obstacles getting information.

He concluded our feedback session "reminding" us that the audience really didnt care how hard it was to get the needed data and how long it took, their interest was the results and any corrective action recommendations.

I think of this lesson when publishing a Project or Road Test report.

If a video is made to share a project, no one is really interested that it took 15 takes or 12 hours to edit the video (unless the article is about the video editor).

The audience probably doesnt care if you filled your hard drive taking hi-rez photos and had to get cloud server space.  

If publishing a schematic, it doesnt matter if there are 5 revisions or 50 revs from start to finish unless there is a key knowledge point to learn in one of those revs. If someone cares, they will ask.   

Its OK to share an anecdote the major milestones and challenges about the journey if it helps tell the story. 

What's your experience  ? 

   

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  •    Fantastic question.  I have been taught the primary question is "What is the purpose of your report / blog / video / etc?"  The second question is "Who is your audience?"  I believe that these two questions are intertwined.  With Roadtests, we give our sales pitch in the application and the sponsor gets an opportunity to decide if our approach meets their intent (purpose / method / level of detail).

    If I'm selected, I run with the game plan.  I know that my audience, the e14 community, has really smart and talented people... and that they won't shred me for what I produce.  Skill levels range from just starting out to orders of magnitude beyond my understanding.  So I do what is within my ability to do and I write about it.  I try to be somewhat entertaining and share what I learned along the way - so someone else (similar to me) can learn from my challenges.

    As to your boss, Thumbsdown.  Most engineers that I know WANT to know the process, pitfalls, challenges and solutions.  The method is as important as the outcome.  The details don't have the same value to the manager as they do the engineer because the manager has different accountabilities.  Again, what was the purpose of the presentation?  If not objective was shared, that's on your boss.

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  •    Fantastic question.  I have been taught the primary question is "What is the purpose of your report / blog / video / etc?"  The second question is "Who is your audience?"  I believe that these two questions are intertwined.  With Roadtests, we give our sales pitch in the application and the sponsor gets an opportunity to decide if our approach meets their intent (purpose / method / level of detail).

    If I'm selected, I run with the game plan.  I know that my audience, the e14 community, has really smart and talented people... and that they won't shred me for what I produce.  Skill levels range from just starting out to orders of magnitude beyond my understanding.  So I do what is within my ability to do and I write about it.  I try to be somewhat entertaining and share what I learned along the way - so someone else (similar to me) can learn from my challenges.

    As to your boss, Thumbsdown.  Most engineers that I know WANT to know the process, pitfalls, challenges and solutions.  The method is as important as the outcome.  The details don't have the same value to the manager as they do the engineer because the manager has different accountabilities.  Again, what was the purpose of the presentation?  If not objective was shared, that's on your boss.

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  • in reply to kmikemoo

    This was several (or more) years ago, actually my boss was absolutely correct and the team appreciated the honesty. This was a manager we really trusted, he had almost zero turnover in his staff. The entire staff was very experienced and we did the presentation every 2 weeks. There were influences that caused the presentation to go off track a bit, but a little coaching put it right back on track. After that feedback, we all stepped up our game and actually joked about it every 2 weeks.