I have worked on and seen other projects that have come through and there was always a huge difference in how they were received by how they were presented. In meetings having good quality visuals make more of a difference than you would think. Photo by Marília Castelli on Unsplash Project VisualizationĪlthough you can make a good argument that this is a part of storytelling, I am separating it because storytelling is more surrounding charisma and interpersonal skills and I believe that project visualization is an extension of technical skills for explaining a project. This means showing how the project evolved through time to where it is now and the plans to steer the project in the future. Lastly, for storytelling, there will likely be lookbacks and/or reviews along with development, and being able to congruently state and connect a timeline of the project will allow those not in the team to clearly see the progress of the project. Probably only a technical team member would want to know of the details of a database accessibility issue, whereas a stakeholder would probably only need to that there could be delays due to data access. To help with dealing with the audience learning how to focus in and out of the details of the project is key. Focusing on the right topics is crucial to ensure everyone is aware of their respective roles of the project and ultimately help contribute as much as needed throughout the development of the project. Stakeholders are likely interested in project estimates of time/cost and value to be delivered, business folks want to know that it has a sound design relative to their business processes, and end-users want to know how to make it easy to use and understand. It’s so easy for folks with technical backgrounds to get too deep into the weed and lose the audience. Knowing the audience is critical to communicate efficiently and effectively to different members of a project (like the stakeholders/backers, the team members, business function, and end-users). Beyond being able to paint a picture of how things work, storytelling also includes the ability to know the audience, focus in/out on details, and be able to explain in conjunction a timeline of a project (history, current state, and future state). I think the word storytelling itself is being used a lot more as a buzzword, but there is actually little elaboration on what is encapsulated in the “storytelling” skill.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash Storytelling

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