I got my PASS Summit 2010 Feedback earlier this week and am blown away with the results! Actually, I’m humbled, very humbled. Before I bore you with the scores or anything: today is my brother Jason’s Birthday ( blog | twitter | flickr ) so I thought I’d share with you some pictures he took while he was out there with us at the PASS Summit. This one is taken from the Columbia Tower (the REALLY tall black building, well I guess it’s not actually that tall, I mean it’s not as tall as Bank of America Plaza in Atlanta 
but anyways…). The Columbia tower is a much better deal than the Space Needle, it only costs $5 to go up and it’s MUCH taller.
Onto the boring part:
I put a lot of work into that session and even on the day of the event I was still second-guessing what scripts to put in and which to leave-out. Thankfully fellow [PowerShell] speaker Trevor Barkhouse ( blog | twitter ) sat through my entire presentation that morning and helped me carefully tweak the sequence of scripts. I had the 4th most well attended session of the 186 sessions at the PASS Summit on the official scoring list I was sent! My scores were nothing short of amazing considering I had never spoken on a stage this large before. Even if you leave the whole first-time-at-Summit-speaker thing out I still scored just above the midpoint for all speakers at the Summit. Not half bad for a n00b <—Literally!
I am not a professional speaker. In fact I have been speaking for less than a year still. I had a time budget in preparation and I had to make trade offs. I decided to focus vastly more time on demos and script flow than slides or things like inserting jokes in the session. I’ll definitely work to improve the things that people comment on and I’ll share those in a later post (short on time today).
The Scores:
| How would you rate the… | Score |
|---|---|
| amount of time allocated to cover the topic/session? | 4.17 |
| Speaker’s presentation skills? | 4.33 |
| quality of the presentation materials? | 4.41 |
| usefulness of the information presented in your day-to-day environment? | 4.46 |
| accuracy of the session title, description and experience level to the actual session? | 4.5 |
| Speaker’s knowledge of the subject? | 4.62 |
Time allotted: Based on the comments from people who came up and talked to me afterwards at the Summit, they would have loved for me to have kept going for another 20 minutes. I don’t think Adam Machanic ( blog | twitter ) would have appreciated that much but I sure had the material for it! 
Presentation skills:I will definitely work on upping my presentation skills but this is the toughest competition I’ve ever been up against so not half bad!
Quality of the materials: This may have been lowered because of the many A/V related comments I received. Or maybe refining my presentation skills will help this too.
Usefulness in your day-to-day environment: is the entire reason I put the presentation together in the first place. My goal for this particular score is not a number but a note from the organizers mentioning the shocking number of people who scratched out the choices and wrote in a number above the range. I will not let people down the next time
Accuracy of title: I have some ideas on how to tweak the abstract a little but I’m happy with this score.
Speaker’s knowledge: I’m happy with this score. I’m sure Adam (who was speaking right after me) got nothing but 5s on this score. Considering the company, my score was stellar. I will not spend any time thinking about let alone trying to improve this score.
I’ll post the comments I received in a separate post. Gotta run.
Oh btw… that table up there. Generated if off of an Excel spreadsheet using a single line of PowerShell code! (I’ll blog that soon, promise.)
One Response
Great job Aaron. Can’t wait to see you again and maybe one of these days I’ll actually attend a session by you.
I KNOW you know PowerShell so I’d give you a 5 on knowledge.