What is more intimidating than a PowerPoint ninja? How about a coordinated team of angry PowerPoint ninjas? (c)iStockphoto/Ethan Myerson

In various business scenarios, you might find yourself a part of a team that is responsible for building and presenting a PowerPoint presentation. When you’re working independently on your own PowerPoint slides, you have full control over the outcome of your presentation. Coordinating a PowerPoint presentation with other individuals introduces new challenges, which can frustrate even PowerPoint ninjas who are caught unprepared. As a team, you don’t want to waste time on unnecessary or overlapping PowerPoint slides, or reworking poorly designed slides at the end. In order to be successful with group or team presentations, you should consider the following eight tips:

1. Create a game plan for the presentation. Determine upfront who will build slides for each topic. Discuss how many slides or how much time each person has for their sections. Agree on who will present which slides.
2. Ensure someone on the team is the presentation owner. Somebody has to take ownership of the final deliverable, especially if everyone working on the slides is a peer of each other.
3. Have someone establish the style, colors, fonts, etc. early on so that other people can emulate the same look and feel as they build their slides. Consistency is critical to producing a professional-looking presentation. This tactic will also reduce the level of effort required to integrate all of the slides later on.
4. Use the same template to avoid having to correct formatting issues at the end of the process when you import everyone’s slides into the main slide deck.
5. Factor in extra time if you have never worked with an individual on the team before. You might get lucky with a team member who is conscientious with decent PowerPoint skills, but are you willing to risk it?
6. Meet often enough to keep different sections of the PowerPoint presentation in synch but not too often that it impedes the process of completing actual slides.
7. Leave ample time to integrate all of the slides prior to delivering the PowerPoint presentation. The integration process usually takes longer than you think it will, and it is typically best handled by one person, which can create a bottleneck.
8. Rehearse the presentation together, if you’re team presenting, in order to work out transitions, timing, and appropriate content coverage.

PowerPoint ninjas love nothing more than to divide and conquer business presentations. However, the Code of the PowerPoint Ninja demands that we maintain high standards regardless of whether or not one person or multiple people are involved in preparing and delivering PowerPoint presentations. Hopefully, these eight tips can help you with the success of your future group or team presentations.

Tags: colors, group presentations, planning, preparation, team presentations, Templates, time management