If there's one thing that today's festivities drove home to me, it's that organization is probably the most critical part of a successful (or at least coherent) pitch.
Parts of the pitches (today as well as last Monday) seemed to lack solid organization and planning. This led to wasted time, poor format, or repeated material. For example, one team had two speakers, but there appeared to be little coordination between what each was to talk about during the pitch. Each speaker basically went over the same set of points. In another pitch, it became clear the presentation hadn't been rehearsed for time when they burned through their material in about 4-5 minutes of what was supposed to be a 7-9 minute talk. There were also instances where a group member would answer a question or state something about the project, only for another group member to chime in with a contradiction a moment later. That last blunder isn't so much an issue with presentation prep as it is an issue with the team being on different pages about the project plans.
It's kind of hard for me to tell if my team's first presentation suffered from these errors. I know we didn't have a timing problem, as our pitch ran for about 8 minutes without any filler or time-wasting. I'd like to think the pitch we gave was orderly and on point. There wasn't really a chance for our team members to contradict each other, because I did almost all of the project speaking; other team members just introduced themselves and chimed in as appropriate for questions. A couple of the teams also lacked a solid conclusion, a flaw I'm well aware our presentation exhibited. But to be honest, besides giving a conclusion that's as strong as the introduction, I'm not sure what else to work on for the next presentation. I guess that's something I should ask Ackley, Nikan, one of my team members, or someone in the class about. Cause I'm sure the last pitch wasn't perfect (as nothing is).
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