PASS Summit Evaluations

Introduction

I admire the way Grant Fritchey (Blog – @GFritchey) blogged about his PASS Summit Evaluations for several reasons. Chief among them: I love the transparency. It’s inspiring! Here’s mine:

BIA-532-S: Applied SSIS Design Patterns, 119 evaluations

Usefulness of Session
Poor: 1
Average: 15
Good: 38
Excellent: 65

Speaker’s Presentation Skills
Poor: 1
Average: 13
Good: 37
Excellent: 68

Speaker’s Knowledge
Poor: 0
Average: 1
Good: 18
Excellent: 100

Accuracy of Session Description, etc.
Poor: 1
Average: 15
Good: 35
Excellent: 68

Amount of Time for Session
Poor: 2
Average: 11
Good: 50
Excellent: 56

Quality of Materials
Poor: 1
Average: 11
Good: 42
Excellent: 65

Comments:
Very good use of demonstrations/presentation. Presentation continued advanced information, which was good. Could have went deeper with more time.
Great tips…knowledgable speaker!
THE BEST YET!
Wanted more info on which pattern to use when and why.
I’ll be buying the summit dvd just to be able to watch Andy’s excellent presentation!
Hard to follow specific code, like call by reference example.

I charted this data (I couldn’t help myself) as shown:

By Category:

By Eval Score:

Take-Aways

I throw out the Time category because, frankly, I have no control over that. This was a spotlight presentation and I had 90 minutes. I think I crammed as much into those minutes as I possibly could without talking faster, and I try to speak at a steady pace when presenting. Some people claim I have an accent… I’m not buying it. I speak normally, everybody else talks funny… 😉

Other than Time, Materials and Usefulness received the next lowest amount of high marks, so I need to work on both of those areas for future presentations.

After the presentation, I received comments ranging from enthusiastic to “Yep, I knew all that already.” This was my first attempt at a Level 500 talk, so I was nervous. In fact, I made changes to the demos and flow of the presentation until about an hour before I delivered it. This isn’t a good thing for lots of reasons, but the main reason is I saw lots of disappointed looks when attendees opened the outdated copy of the slides on their laptops. It’s an honor to present at the PASS Summit. I need to do a better job of completing my presentation, demos, and thoughts prior to the event.

I was honored by the high number of Excellent ratings in the Speaker Knowledge category, and by the positive feedback in general (Excellent ratings outweighed all others by a margin of 422:292). Thanks!

PD-103, A Tale of Careers and User Groups, 6 evals

Usefulness of Session
Poor: 0
Average: 0
Good: 3
Excellent: 3

Speaker’s Presentation Skills
Poor: 0
Average: 0
Good: 3
Excellent: 3

Speaker’s Knowledge
Poor: 0
Average: 0
Good: 1
Excellent: 5

Accuracy of Session Description, etc.
Poor: 0
Average: 0
Good: 1
Excellent: 5

Amount of Time for Session
Poor: 0
Average: 0
Good: 4
Excellent: 2

Quality of Materials
Poor: 0
Average: 0
Good: 5
Excellent: 1

Comments:
Andy has a great, informal presenting style that lends itself well to talking about the power and importance of community.
Great job answering questions.
Exactly what I was hoping for.

I charted this data too!

By Category:

By Eval Score:

TakeAways

This was a sparsely-attended session, but we had a fantastic group and discussion! I hope anyone interested in learning more about supporting a user group through local business sponsorships will check out the DVDs and related material.

The sample size here is small, and the attendees were all very nice on their evaluations and comments. Thanks!

:{> Andy