5 Tools In A CTO’s Arsenal For Making Tech Proposals
When preparing your tech proposal, there are many hurdles to overcome – first and foremost, you need to align it with long-term organisational goals, but this is only the beginning. In order to truly ace the proposal in front of the board, you will need a good selection of tools for making tech proposals to help you prepare.
#1 PowerPoint
It goes without saying that PowerPoint is the go-to tool when you’re making a tech proposal. It helps you emphasis what you’re presenting, can make your proposal more engaging and offers a delivery method that is pleasing to the eye. Just remember to keep information concise! There’s no point in you just reading off of a slide so keep it brief and make your speech go hand in hand.
Some pointers on how to design your PowerPoint presentation include the following:
- Your first slide is the one that should grab their attention, so be direct and simply list all the topics you will cover. Avoid any specifics here.
- After that, discuss the risks the business are currently facing, as well as the potential impact they might see.
- Then discuss possible solutions you’re proposing and how your tech solutions will contribute to business optimisation, execution, and efficiency.
- The closing slide should always be strong, summarise the most important points, and be clear about your requests.
Statistics are the key here! The board and senior staff members are interested in the numbers! They want you to justify and quantify what you’re saying.
#2 Canva
Compelling graphics help you emphasise key points and help the board members remember key data and statistics.
Canva is a great beginner graphics tool that can help you. It’s very simple to use, with tons of templates to get you started. There are free templates to choose from, or you can create your own designs from scratch too. Plus, they have PowerPoint-ready formats you can adapt to save you even more time.
#3 Boardish
Boardish is a uniquely equipped platform that helps you to quantify risks and solutions using visualisations and calculations that the board can relate to. You can use these visualisations in your presentation to demonstrate how specific factors will affect the organisation.
It means the board will have an easier time grasping the actual impact of your proposal when you present some hands-on evidence, and they will see clearly how doing nothing or not implementing specific security options will affect them in the long term.
#4 Prezi
For those who want a fully dynamic presentation, this tool for making tech proposals is the next step up from PowerPoint. Instead of making your proposal a one-sided and linear experience, Prezi makes your proposal highly interactive.
There are no slides, just a single large canvas where all the other elements are located. Going from one point to another doesn’t involve going from slide to slide, but from one element to another. You can zoom in, reveal, or jump between elements to achieve a dynamic look.
The only downside is that you have to pay for this particular solution because all presentations are public by default in the free version of Prezi.
#5 Collaboration Tools
Whether it’s PowerPoint Online or Google Slides, being able to collaborate on your presentation with the rest of your IT team or switching devices while preparing your presentation will save you time and resources. If you will be the only one working on the presentation, you can opt for cloud storage options instead of collaborative software solutions to make it simple to work on from anywhere.
A well-prepared tech proposal will be much more than just a well laid out reasoning on why certain IT or cyber security upgrades are needed. It will have captivating visuals, a good narrative, and the right data and statistics too.
