Cisco Live continues to be one of the leading technical conferences in the U.S. The highly anticipated and well-attended annual event is where technology professionals gather to share innovative ideas and transformations taking place in our digital world.
At Cisco Live 2016 in Las Vegas, a record of more than 28,000 people attended in person, along with a massive virtual audience. Decca’s Cisco Support Team provided assistance for 600 PowerPoint presentations before the show in less than a month, and 760 presentations onsite. This was an increase of 236 decks from the prior year, and accounted for approximately 75,000 slides.
Five years ago, when Cisco recognized the need for greater visual and technical consistency during the annual conference, Decca came up with the solution of a Decca Support Team. Each year, Decca designed a PowerPoint template that met the needs of conference organizers and followed the Cisco brand guidelines. The next step was to make sure that presenters could get their ideas and visuals across effectively. Thus the review process
was born.
The Decca team is onsite during the conference, reviewing final presentations and providing last-minute assistance to any speakers who need it. To handle this volume of work quickly without impacting speaker schedules, Decca developed a tracking tool to track daily workflow and make sign-in easier for speakers. The tool featured a walk up sign-in, pre-populated with session IDs and speaker names, so speakers could sign in quickly and get on the wait list or make appointments during busy times. A recently added function in 2016 sent speakers text reminders of their appointment time. They could respond if they were unable to make their appointment, and even reschedule.
As the next step in achieving presentation excellence, Decca President Sheila Hatch hosted a WebEx conference for approximately 350 Cisco Live speakers. The session included best practices in creating presentations, and examples of compelling visuals that are concise, and consistent with Cisco corporate brand initiatives. Decca also provided materials to help speakers make high quality presentations. The materials included an At-a-Glance PowerPoint tips and tricks, a presenter’s checklist, and various video tutorials for both PC and Mac users to assist in specific PowerPoint tasks.
