I’ve always said that I don’t really consider myself a technology or a web person. Instead I think of myself as more of a problem solver through technology. If you remember a while back I wrote a blog post on Email Management Best Practices. I very much know the challenges and problems with letting an inbox rule your work life.
In a management role there are a lot of times where it is up to me to come up with solutions to problems and then roll them out. I highly recommend a wiki to document and keep up with policies, procedures and work flows. Wikis are especially great in the web world because they are second nature to us and very flexible. Despite this, not everyone uses a wiki as comfortably as web citizens. There are always situations where we need to present a new proposal or change and the wiki won’t work. This is where the presentation comes into play.
I am very much in favor of the art of presentation zen when it comes to using PowerPoint for presentations. Despite this I’ve found detailing problems and problem solving to be a very valuable use for the PowerPoint besides just presenting. When solving issues at work, these days much of it still happens through email because there can’t always be a formal meeting. Because of this and my rules of email management I don’t want to write out a detailed email with all the steps. I’d rather attach a presentation deck with all the details in bite sized chunks on each slide. This allows readers to consume one piece of the puzzle at a time while they build towards a complete understanding.
Problem Solving Deck
Attached above you will find a template that you can use for solving problems both for presenting at meetings and emailing individuals. I’ll be honest, this deck may seem like overkill going through every step of the process. Normally you should be able to put together a deck of 5 slides, which is the magic number I strive for.
Enjoy and let me know if you have any questions. Hopefully being able to detail out the steps in this format will change your work life like it has mine.
This post was written by Kyle James
About the author
Kyle is the CEO & Co-Founder at nuCloud and formerly the webmaster at Wofford College. He also spent almost 4 years at HubSpot doing a range of jobs including inbound marketing consulting, sales, management, and product management. Kyle is an active contributor in the social media spectrum. Although his background is technical, he claims to know a thing or two about marketing, but mostly that revolves around SEO, analytics, blogging, and social media. He has spoken at multiple national conferences and done countless webinars on topics ranging from e-mail marketing to social media and Web analytics. He’s definitely a fairly nice guy.
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