PASS Summit 2015 session evaluation has been finalized and published for speakers. I want to take this opportunity to thank you all who evaluated me (either good or bad 🙂 ). I want to thank you because you spent your precious time for me to let me know how I did at the session. It is the greatest and most fantastic things for me, and I believe for any other speaker. I want to tell you how grateful I am with hearing your comments and evaluations.

Why Session Evaluation Are So Important?

Everyone like to sit in great sessions. When you are at a summit with 10 or 12 parallel sessions happening at the same time, you want to sit on the best that suits your need and you want to get the most value out of the time you are putting on that. You choose a session and sit for listening and watching. However after 20 minutes you understand that this is not a worthy session, and there might be heaps of reasons for that; the content doesn’t cover what topic promised, or the speaker is not presenting it in a good way, there is no demo (in spite of what you expected), session level is not high enough (or sometimes it is very higher than what you expect), environment is not designed well, and the list goes on and on. When you stock in this situation not only you loose your existing session, but also you loose all other 10 parallel session that you could attend but gave them up because of this.

Well I said story above to mention that everyone like to sit in the best possible session. All speakers usually do their bests to deliver you the best that they can, however sometimes there are aspects of their speech or presentation that they are not aware of, or they might not think that this is an important factor for audience. So they need to hear that from you. You are the best evaluator for session that you are sitting at. You are the best evaluator for your speaker. You can tell him or her that; he should focus on demos more, or she can speak in slower pace, or whatever else. The feedback you are giving to your speakers is the best gift to them.

My Session Evaluations for Past Three Years

I personally read all of comments I receive carefully and work on them one by one, I spend time to fix any issues mentioned in the comments, and I’ve been fortunately good at fixing them. I like to show you it in a real world. Here is my speaking evaluation result for past three years of PASS Summit speaking;

I justified the scores, because in PASS Summit 2013 and 2014 number of questions was more, and in 2015 it is just 3. as an example 2013 summit questions were:

• How would you rate this session overall?
• How would you rate the speaker’s presentation skills?
• How would you rate the speaker’s knowledge of the subject?
• How would you rate the accuracy of the session title, description, and experience level to the session presented?
• How would you rate the quality of the presentation materials?
• Did you learn what you expected from this session?

So I’ve combined some questions and took average of the result to make it fit into three areas below:

• Overall Session
• Session Content
• Presentation

I’ve also spoken 2 sessions on 2014, so I took average of my scores on them. And here is the final result;

As you see In all three areas the percentage goes higher and higher every year, and this ended to 98% score on my 2015 session. You see a drop on 2014 on the session content, and the main reason for that is environmental issues; the room was small, people were standing or sitting on floor, air conditioning was not enough for that amount of people, and microphone battery flat at last 15 minutes of the session! So I’ve got bad score on environmental issues on that. Except than this in all other aspects you see that your evaluation helped me to improve my session rating from 77% at 2013 to 98% at 2015! I also worked on my presentation skills and speaking skills and that also raised from 80% in 2013 to almost 90% in 2015.

So I want to thank you again. The quality of my session and presentation goes up because of your comments. Please don’t stop writing for me, please don’t stop evaluating me, I need to hear your voice, and I will work hard to make my sessions better and better every time. For the next summit (if I be there) please write for me whatever you think of. Please do this for every other speaker as well. Speakers don’t have a speaker boss who tell them how good or bad they did. You are the boss actually, you tell us where to improve 🙂

How was Summit 2015 evaluation in detail?

I did a talk on Azure Data Factory vs SSIS this year, and it was however a tricky talk because many people are fond of SSIS (I’m in the front of the line myself 🙂 ), and it is hard to hear some areas that Data Factory works better 😉 However I’ve got below result as the evaluation;

Overall Session – Did the title, abstract, and session level align to what was presented?     2.94

Session Content – Was the content useful and relevant?    2.75

Presentation – Was the speaker articulate, prepared, and knowledgeable on the subject matter?    2.69

Scores above are out of 3.

I’ve got also comments as below:

• Fine
• Overall Good session and I picked up some key differences – however the demos jumped around quite a lot and it wasn’t easy to follow them, or it wasn’t well explained as to what the demos were trying to achieve.  The summary was nice as it objectively outl
• Good session.
• Good content, speaker has room for improvement
• Very relevant!!!
• Good overview or features, the demos perfectly underlined your session.
• I personally used this session to get an introduction to ADF since I had not learned about it before. The information given was very useful to me.
• Great session, thank you!
• Good overview or features, the demos perfectly underlined your session.

In spite of my thinking most of you liked the session 98% was very good rating of the session, and I’m proud of that. However I’m still not the best for my presentation skills. I am not a native English speaker, but I don’t want to use that as an excuse. I’ll promise you that you will see better and better speaking from me as time goes on. With your comments and feedback I don’t see it even far for me to be in top 10 speakers list of PASS Summit in near future 😉 Thank You!

Reza Rad

Trainer, Consultant, Mentor

Reza Rad is a Microsoft Regional Director, an Author, Trainer, Speaker and Consultant. He has a BSc in Computer engineering; he has more than 20 years’ experience in data analysis, BI, databases, programming, and development mostly on Microsoft technologies. He is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP for 12 continuous years (from 2011 till now) for his dedication in Microsoft BI. Reza is an active blogger and co-founder of RADACAD. Reza is also co-founder and co-organizer of Difinity conference in New Zealand, Power BI Summit, and Data Insight Summit.
Reza is author of more than 14 books on Microsoft Business Intelligence, most of these books are published under Power BI category. Among these are books such as Power BI DAX Simplified, Pro Power BI Architecture, Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star, Power Query books series, Row-Level Security in Power BI and etc.
He is an International Speaker in Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Business Applications Summit, Data Insight Summit, PASS Summit, SQL Saturday and SQL user groups. And He is a Microsoft Certified Trainer.
Reza’s passion is to help you find the best data solution, he is Data enthusiast.
His articles on different aspects of technologies, especially on MS BI, can be found on his blog: https://radacad.com/blog.