This article discusses the Consulting Presentation Framework. All enterprise system and management consulting companies, these kinds of as McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and Booz Allen, use presentation frameworks. By and substantial, they are all variants of the identical ideas and style and design. Since consulting firms are infamous for acquiring structured and really slides, the Consulting Presentation Framework represents the exceptional way to construction and current your data in the kind of a PowerPoint presentation.
It requires extremely certain rules for font faces, font measurements, type of grammar policies to abide by, and so forth. If almost nothing else, adopting and religiously sticking to the framework will vastly make improvements to the look and professionalism of your slides.
Around the a long time, I have appear across a selection of distinct of these presentation frameworks from the numerous corporations I worked for. Borrowing from all of them, the framework offered in this post is an amalgamation of the factors I felt labored finest.
Now, let us dig in.
On a typical content material slide, there are 3 main parts: the Headline, the Physique, and the Bumper.
The Headline
The Headline sits on top rated of the slide. It is a sentence that introduces the slide. Lots of men and women use this area for the ‘title’ of the slide. In this framework, the ‘title’ will go into the Body (explained in the following area).
The Headline ought to be Arial Slender, font sizing 24, and boldfaced. Do not use any ending punctuation (e.g. no period of time).
As outlined, it is a sentence and 1 sentence max. It is also not to exceed 2 lines. If you uncover it to be lengthier, then reword and shorten your Headline. If the Headline is any for a longer time than 2 traces, your audience will get shed and/or bored. As you go from slide to slide, the sentences in the Headlines ought to join to convey to a cohesive tale for your viewers to comply with.
The Overall body
The Entire body is the bulk of the slide. It consists of all the colourful content (e.g. textboxes, diagrams, etcetera.). Every thing you place in the Physique ought to establish upon what has been released in the Headline. All text within the Overall body should really be Arial font. The minimal font dimensions to use is size 10, due to the fact any measurement more compact (using Arial) is much too tricky to read for most people. This is specifically correct if you are projecting your presentation.
On the best left of your Entire body, you need to have the Title of your slide. The Title is what men and women typically place in the Headline location. It is a brief phrase that categorizes what the Entire body is illustrating. Illustrations involve ‘6-Phase Strategy,’ ‘Objectives of the E-E-book,’ ‘Strategic Hierarchies and Connected Worries.’ As you noticed, the capitalization follows that of a book title (per the MLA). The Title must be Arial, font measurement 16, boldfaced, and italicized.
If you have any numbers or any information and facts on your slide that wants to be sourced, be positive to do it. The source really should show up in a text box on the decreased still left of the Human body. It need to be Arial, font measurement 10, and start with the textual content “Resource:”. Consultants use range of distinctive methodologies and frameworks to framework and layout information for the Overall body. We will not examine these other teachings within this short article.
The Bumper
All consulting firms have this past component, but may perhaps connect with it distinct names. Deloitte & Touche calls it the Acquire-Absent, A.T. Kearny phone calls it the Tombstone, and Capgemini Consulting phone calls it the Kicker.
The reason of the Bumper is to deal with the “so what?” dilemma your audience may have. Whereas the Headline provided an introduction and context to the slide, and the System embellished upon that information with clarifying details, quantities, diagrams, and so forth, you run the chance of your audience contemplating, Alright, this data is appealing, but so what? Why do I need to have to know this? Why must I care?
All those are all good queries and kinds you should response with the Bumper. If you can’t imagine of everything significant to put in the Bumper, ask oneself if you seriously want to have this slide in the deck. In other terms, if the slide would not present any extra perception that is important for your viewers to know, why incorporate it all? Of system, there are a lot of valid good reasons to have a slide with no a Bumper. For occasion, the slide just provides the agenda, is a transitional slide, or only is to supply crucial contact information and facts. From time to time, they slide is purely to current uncooked information.
The Bumper is in the kind of a light-weight colored box at the bottom of the slide. It should really be Arial, font dimension 14, boldfaced, and italicized. Compared with the Headline, it should have ending punctuation. Like the Headline, it is only 1 sentence and 2 strains max.
To make things simple for you, I have designed a PowerPoint template that conforms to this framework for you. You can down load it right here: http://learnppt.com/downloads/sampletemplate/.
