Easy as cherry pie

A few blog posts ago, I talked about using metaphors as a means to talk about complex technical topics to non-technical audiences. Throughout my career as a presenter, I have used figure of speech at many occasions. Here’s another example of a public talk I gave a few years ago (together with a colleague from a partner company) at an industry conference.

Throughout my career as a presenter, I have used figure of speech at many occasions. Here’s an example of a public talk I did a few years ago (together with a colleague from a partner company) at an industry conference.

As the subject of the presentation –a  configuration management and audit tool for IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) networks– was rather technical (and probably rather boring for some part of the audience too), I decided to surprise and entertain the crowd with a story about the challenges of baking a cherry pie…

“Cherrypicking” is a term that is often used in the ICT industry to describe the practice of buying and integrating a number of best-in-class or best-in-price components that are often supplied by different manufacturers. So, the implicit message behind the presentation’s title is that you cannot simply drop multi-vendor equipment into a network and expect everything to work fine… And as such you need to adopt a lifecycle management approach supported by proper configuration management and audit tools.

As the cherry theme provided me with good visual material, that could support different facets of the key message, I used it as a fil rouge throughout the whole slideshow.

You may view the original presentation on SlideShare.

Guidelines for finding the right metaphors to spark your presentations and using them effectively can be found in these Way Beyond Ordinary and SOAP Presentations blog posts.