Successful Speaking for Technical Professionals

“As an evolving program is continually changed, its complexity… increases unless work is done to maintain or reduce it.”  — Meir M. Lehman, computer scientist and pioneer of the Laws of Software Evolution

Engineers can spend large portions of their time fixing legacy systems, addressing defects, updating documentation, and dealing with technical debt instead of designing and building something new.

When engineers complain about “too much maintenance and too little real engineering,” the underlying issue is usually not maintenance itself. 

It is repetitive, reactive work that consumes capacity that should be spent producing permanent improvements, innovation, and better designs—what Google’s Site Reliability Engineering literature calls excessive “toil.” Google SRE

Consider three methods in this podcast to reduce maintenance and increase engineering.

References

• Challoner, David, et al. “Eliminating Toil.” The Site Reliability Workbook, Google/O’Reilly Media, 2018. Provides methods for identifying, measuring, prioritizing, and eliminating repetitive operational work and recommends treating toil reduction as an engineering project. Google Research Google SRE — Eliminating Toil
• Rau, Vivek. “Eliminating Toil.” Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, Google/O’Reilly Media, 2016. Defines engineering toil and explains Google's objective of limiting operational work so engineers retain substantial time for long-term engineering projects. Google SRE
  Google SRE — What Is Toil?
• Google. “Introduction.” Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, 2016. Describes Google's 50% cap on operational work and its rationale for preserving engineering capacity to make systems more stable and operable. Google SRE  Google SRE — Introduction
• DORA. “Continuous Delivery.” Summarizes research connecting continuous-delivery practices—including automated testing and deployment—with improved delivery performance, quality, reduced rework and lower deployment pain. Dora
  DORA — Continuous Delivery
• Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute. “Managing Technical Debt with Data-Driven Analysis.” Describes technical debt as a tradeoff between short-term delivery and the long-term ability to evolve, modify, repair, and sustain systems, and emphasizes actively identifying and managing that debt. SEI
  SEI — Managing Technical Debt

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Being a confident, engaging, and effective technical speaker is a vital personal and professional asset.  With more than 40 years of engineering experience and more than 30 years of award-winning public speaking experience, I can help you reduce your presentation preparatory time by 50%, overcome your fear of public speaking and be completely at ease, deliver your presentations effectively, develop your personal presence with your audience; and apply an innovative way to handle audience questions deftly. 

Working closely with you, I provide a customized protocol employing the critical skills and tools you need to create, practice, and deliver excellent technical speeches and presentations.  Let's connect and explore how I can help you become the exceptional speaker you were meant to be.  Please reach out to me at [email protected] or 703-509-4424 for a complimentary consultation.  Schedule a meeting with me at calendly.com/frankdibartolomeospeaks.   

© 2026 DiBartolomeo Consulting International (DCI), LLC. All Rights Reserved. May not be used without permission.

“The extra effort that it takes to add new features is the interest paid on the debt.” — Martin Fowler, British software developer, author of Technical Debt, 2019, and international public speaker on software development

Engineers contend with technical debt daily.  But what exactly is technical debt?

Technical debt is the future cost created when an organization chooses a quick or suboptimal technical solution today instead of a more sustainable one. 

Like financial debt, the initial shortcut may provide an immediate benefit, but carrying it can create recurring “interest” through additional maintenance, rework, delays, and complexity. 

Schedule pressure, changing requirements, outdated technology, architectural decisions, inadequate testing, and deliberate shortcuts can all create debt that becomes increasingly expensive as a system evolves. 

Engineers must learn to convince executives that technical debt is a business problem. But how can engineers do this?

Explore three ways to do this in this podcast.

References

• Ozkaya, I., & Nord, R. — Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute. Managing the Consequences of Technical Debt: 5 Stories from the Field, May 13, 2019. Defines technical debt and explains how short-term design and implementation decisions can increase future costs and impede system evolution. 
• Besker, T., Martini, A., & Bosch, J. “Software Developer Productivity Loss Due to Technical Debt—A Replication and Extension Study Examining Developers’ Development Work.” Journal of Systems and Software, 2019. The study reports developers losing an average of approximately 23% of their working time because of technical debt. 
• McKinsey & Company. Breaking Technical Debt's Vicious Cycle to Modernize Your Business, 2023. Examines technical debt as a business and financial issue, including its effects on engineering capacity, modernization, operating costs, and organizational performance. 
• Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute. 5 Recommendations to Help Your Organization Manage Technical Debt, 2024. Discusses technical debt at the program level, including architecture, testing, documentation, technology refresh, sustainment, cybersecurity, and lifecycle consequences. 
• McKinsey & Company. Tech Debt: Reclaiming Tech Equity, 2020. Recommends that organizations treat technical debt as a business issue rather than merely a technology problem and link technical-debt reduction to business value, strategic priorities, and risk reduction. 

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Being a confident, engaging, and effective technical speaker is a vital personal and professional asset.  With more than 40 years of engineering experience and more than 30 years of award-winning public speaking experience, I can help you reduce your presentation preparatory time by 50%, overcome your fear of public speaking and be completely at ease, deliver your presentations effectively, develop your personal presence with your audience; and apply an innovative way to handle audience questions deftly. 

Working closely with you, I provide a customized protocol employing the critical skills and tools you need to create, practice, and deliver excellent technical speeches and presentations.  Let's connect and explore how I can help you become the exceptional speaker you were meant to be.  Please reach out to me at [email protected] or 703-509-4424 for a complimentary consultation.  Schedule a meeting with me at calendly.com/frankdibartolomeospeaks.   

© 2026 DiBartolomeo Consulting International (DCI), LLC. All Rights Reserved. May not be used without permission.

“Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.”
— Peter F. Drucker, management consultant and author

One of the most frustrating activities for engineers is attending inefficient meetings.

Engineers are taught in engineering school to always use the most efficient design.  Why can’t this apply to the meetings they attend?

The truth is, meetings can be more efficient if you follow the three steps in this podcast.

References 

• MIT Sloan School of Management — Meredith Somers, “5 Ways to Avoid Ineffective Meetings,” June 17, 2020. Recommends cataloging issues in advance and measuring meeting effectiveness through decisions made and problems solved. 
• Atlassian — “How to Run Effective Meetings in the Era of Hybrid Work,” February 24, 2022. Addresses agendas, meeting objectives, attendee selection, decision-making, action items, and when information should be communicated asynchronously. 
• Atlassian — “How to Write an Effective Team Meeting Agenda.” Recommends prioritizing agenda items, defining meeting purposes, allocating time to topics, and giving participants advance preparation time. 
• Atlassian — “How to Turn Meeting Action Items Into Trackable Work.” Defines effective action items around an owner, specific action, scope, expected outcome, and deadline. 
• Atlassian/Confluence — “Meeting Minutes Template.” Recommends documenting agenda items, decisions, action items, owners, and deadlines while using time-boxes to maintain meeting focus. 

© 2026 DiBartolomeo Consulting International (DCI), LLC. All Rights Reserved. May not be used without permission.

“When you get to about 70% of all possible data, it’s probably time to make a decision and not wait for the last 30. That’s judgment.” — General Colin Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

You’ve delivered your technical presentation, hoping executives in the audience will decide. But at the end of your presentation, no decision is made.  How frustrating.

Without a decision, you can’t move forward with your recommended action. What can you do?

In this podcast, you will discover three ways to steer an executive audience to a decision.

References 

• McKinsey & Company. “The Limits of RACI—and a Better Way to Make Decisions.” McKinsey & Company, 2022. Discusses explicitly identifying meetings as decision, discussion, or information meetings and defining decision-making roles. 
• McKinsey & Company. “Untangling Your Organization’s Decision Making.” McKinsey Quarterly, June 21, 2017. Recommends focusing decision meetings on solutions, using prework, bringing the necessary facts to the table, and clearly assigning ownership after decisions.  
• McKinsey & Company. “Want a Better Decision? Plan a Better Meeting.” McKinsey Quarterly, May 8, 2019. Defines the roles of decision makers, advisers, recommenders, and execution partners and emphasizes recommendations based on analysis of alternatives and trade-offs. 
• McKinsey & Company. “What Is an Effective Meeting?” McKinsey Explainers, January 17, 2023. Explains that decision-making meetings require clarity about who makes the decision and should produce a final decision rather than simply additional discussion. 
• McKinsey & Company. “If We’re All So Busy, Why Isn’t Anything Getting Done?” McKinsey Quarterly, January 10, 2022. Describes the DARE decision-rights model and the recommender's responsibility to analyze alternatives, explain pros and cons, and recommend a course of action. 

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Being a confident, engaging, and effective technical speaker is a vital personal and professional asset.  With more than 40 years of engineering experience and more than 30 years of award-winning public speaking experience, I can help you reduce your presentation preparatory time by 50%, overcome your fear of public speaking and be completely at ease, deliver your presentations effectively, develop your personal presence with your audience; and apply an innovative way to handle audience questions deftly. 

Working closely with you, I provide a customized protocol employing the critical skills and tools you need to create, practice, and deliver excellent technical speeches and presentations.  Let's connect and explore how I can help you become the exceptional speaker you were meant to be.  Please reach out to me at [email protected] or 703-509-4424 for a complimentary consultation.  Schedule a meeting with me at calendly.com/frankdibartolomeospeaks.   

© 2026 DiBartolomeo Consulting International (DCI), LLC. All Rights Reserved. May not be used without permission.

 “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower, General of the Army and 34th President of the United States

You deal with risk every day.

You deal with risk when you drive to work. You deal with risk every time your son or daughter plays soccer. You deal with risk as an airline passenger.

And you deal with risk every day as an engineer.  Risk management is part and parcel of your job. 

You face major risks when you embark on hardware and/or software development.  Your ability to identify, analyze, and recommend how to proceed with these risks determines your performance as an engineer.

So how can you present these risks without sounding alarmist?

In this podcast, you will discover three ways to do this.

References

• NASA. NASA Systems Engineering Handbook, Section 6.4: Technical Risk Management. Defines risk through scenarios, likelihood, consequences, and uncertainties and discusses mitigation, contingency actions, trigger thresholds, monitoring, and communication. NASA Technical Risk Management  
• Institute of Medicine. (2013). Environmental Decisions in the Face of Uncertainty, Chapter 6, “Communication of Uncertainty.” Washington, DC: National Academies Press. DOI: 10.17226/12568. Discusses numerical, verbal, and graphical communication of probability and notes the ambiguity inherent in terms such as “likely” and “unlikely.” National Academies — Communication of Uncertainty 
• National Research Council. (2006). Completing the Forecast: Characterizing and Communicating Uncertainty for Better Decisions Using Weather and Climate Forecasts. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. DOI: 10.17226/11699. Explains problems with verbal probability expressions and the advantages of numerical probabilities and relative frequencies. 
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2017). Communicating Science Effectively: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. DOI: 10.17226/23674. Reviews evidence on communicating scientific uncertainty and how audiences interpret numerical and probabilistic information. 
• McGuire, M. (2023). Lessons Learned With Risk Management: A Systems Engineer’s Perspective. NASA Technical Reports Server. Emphasizes risk management as a communication mechanism that allows engineering teams to identify concerns early and implement mitigation before risks become failures. 

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Being a confident, engaging, and effective technical speaker is a vital personal and professional asset.  With more than 40 years of engineering experience and more than 30 years of award-winning public speaking experience, I can help you reduce your presentation preparatory time by 50%, overcome your fear of public speaking and be completely at ease, deliver your presentations effectively, develop your personal presence with your audience; and apply an innovative way to handle audience questions deftly. 

Working closely with you, I provide a customized protocol employing the critical skills and tools you need to create, practice, and deliver excellent technical speeches and presentations.  Let's connect and explore how I can help you become the exceptional speaker you were meant to be.  Please reach out to me at [email protected] or 703-509-4424 for a complimentary consultation.  Schedule a meeting with me at calendly.com/frankdibartolomeospeaks.   

© 2026 DiBartolomeo Consulting International (DCI), LLC. All Rights Reserved. May not be used without permission.

“Bad news isn't wine. It doesn't improve with age.” — Colin Powell, American U.S. Army general, diplomat, and statesman

Are you intimidated by the idea of disagreeing with an executive in your company?  Many engineers are.  

You may feel that disagreeing with an executive will hurt your credibility, your chances for promotion, or even keep you from keeping your job. When done the right way, disagreeing with an executive when warranted will usually have the opposite effect.

Successful executives know that they don’t have all the answers.  And they usually don’t tolerate “yes men and women.”

In fact, they prefer engineers who tell them the unvarnished truth, even when it conflicts with the executive’s own view.

In this article, we will explore three ways engineers can disagree with executives without damaging their credibility.

References

• Gallo, Amy. “How to Disagree with Someone More Powerful than You.” Harvard Business Review, March 17, 2016. Discusses assessing the risks of speaking up, connecting disagreement to shared goals, asking permission to dissent, avoiding judgmental language, and respecting the decision-maker's authority.
• Edmondson, Amy C. “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.” Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 2, June 1999, pp. 350–383. The study of 51 work teams established psychological safety as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking and connected it with learning behavior.
• Nembhard, Ingrid M., and Amy C. Edmondson. “Making It Safe: The Effects of Leader Inclusiveness and Professional Status on Psychological Safety and Improvement Efforts in Health Care Teams.” Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vol. 27, No. 7, 2006, pp. 941–966. Examines hierarchy, professional status, leader inclusiveness, and employees' willingness to speak up
• Nembhard, Ingrid M., and Amy C. Edmondson. “Psychological Safety: A Foundation for Speaking Up, Collaboration, and Experimentation in Organizations.” The Oxford Handbook of Positive Organizational Scholarship, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 491–504. Reviews evidence linking 

© 2026 DiBartolomeo Consulting International (DCI), LLC. All Rights Reserved. May not be used without permission.

© 2026 DiBartolomeo Consulting International (DCI), LLC. All Rights Reserved. May not be used without permission.

“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it.” — William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was one of the most influential physicists and engineers of the 19th century

Engineers routinely work with probabilities, assumptions, incomplete data, forecasts, simulations, and technical risk. 

The challenge is to acknowledge what is unknown while remaining clear about what should be done. 

Research on risk communication consistently supports communicating uncertainty rather than hiding it—but tying that uncertainty directly to its significance for the decision. 

In this podcast, you will discover three ways you can communicate uncertainty without sounding uncertain.

References 

• National Research Council. Improving Risk Communication. National Academies Press, 1989. The report recommends explicitly disclosing meaningful uncertainties, data gaps, confidence levels, and disagreements while avoiding both minimizing and exaggerating uncertainty. 
• Institute of Medicine. Environmental Decisions in the Face of Uncertainty. National Academies Press, 2013. Chapter 6 examines how uncertainty should be communicated in decision-making, including confidence, risk estimates, audience characteristics, and the effect uncertainty has on decisions. 
• Spiegelhalter, David. “Risk and Uncertainty Communication.” Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, Vol. 4, 2017, pp. 31–60. Reviews methods for communicating numerical risk, probabilities, verbal expressions, graphics, and deeper forms of uncertainty. 
• Sudret, Bruno; Podofillini, Luca; and Zio, Enrico. “Treatment of Uncertainty in Risk and Reliability Modeling and Decision-Making.” ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2019. Emphasizes that uncertainty modeling, decision-making under uncertainty, and communication of uncertainty should be integral to engineering risk management. 
• NASA. NASA Risk-Informed Decision Making Handbook, NASA/SP-2010-576, 2010. Provides a structured framework for evaluating alternatives and making engineering and program decisions when significant uncertainty exists. 

© 2026 DiBartolomeo Consulting International (DCI), LLC. All Rights Reserved. May not be used without permission.

“If you can’t communicate and talk to other people and get across your ideas, you’re giving up your potential.” --- Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway

Technical competence may earn professionals credibility, but strong presentation skills help decision-makers see, understand, and trust that competence. 

For engineers and other technical professionals, presenting effectively can demonstrate the communication, influence, strategic thinking, and leadership capabilities expected at higher organizational levels. 

In this podcast, we will explore three reasons excellent presentation skills lead to faster promotions.

References 

• National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). “Career Readiness Competencies: Communication.” Revised March 2025. NACE defines workplace communication as clearly and effectively exchanging information, ideas, facts, and perspectives and specifically identifies persuasion, influencing, organized communication, and verbal and nonverbal abilities as important workplace behaviors. NACE Communication Competency
• National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). “Career Readiness Development and Validation.” 2025. In NACE's foundational employer research involving 606 employer respondents, 91.6% identified oral/written communication as essential or absolutely essential, placing communication among the most highly valued workplace competencies. NACE Career Readiness Research
• National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). “What Is Career Readiness?” NACE identifies communication, critical thinking, leadership, professionalism, teamwork, technology, and career/self-development among the core competencies associated with workplace and career success. Its communication behaviors specifically include persuasion, influence, clarity, organization, and adapting communication to others. NACE Career Readiness Competencies
• Project Management Institute. “Power Skills and Project Success.” PMI. PMI identifies communication, problem-solving, collaborative leadership, and strategic thinking among the most important power skills and connects these interpersonal capabilities with successful organizational outcomes. These are precisely the capabilities professionals can demonstrate visibly through effective presentations. PMI Power Skills and Project Success
• Rabelo, Dannilo, et al. “Communication Skills in Software Engineering: A Multivocal Review.” 2026. This recent review of academic and professional literature found strong agreement that communication is a core competency in software engineering, reinforcing that technical expertise alone does not define professional effectiveness. 

© 2026 DiBartolomeo Consulting International (DCI), LLC. All Rights Reserved. May not be used without permission.

"Seek first to understand, then to be understood." — Stephen R. Covey, from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989). Covey (1932–2012) was an educator, leadership consultant, and internationally recognized author.

Technical expertise may earn engineers a seat at the table, but communication earns them influence. 

The engineers who are most respected by colleagues, managers, and executives consistently communicate with clarity, credibility, and purpose. 

This podcast explores three habits of highly respected engineers.

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References 

• Gallo, Carmine. Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World's Top Minds. St. Martin's Press, 2014.  
• Duarte, Nancy. Resonate: Present Visual Stories That Transform Audiences. John Wiley & Sons, 2010.  
• Brown, Brené. Dare to Lead. Random House, 2018.  
• Covey, Stephen R. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Free Press, 1989.
• Edmondson, Amy C. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. John Wiley & Sons, 2019. 

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Being a confident, engaging, and effective technical speaker is a vital personal and professional asset.  With more than 40 years of engineering experience and more than 30 years of award-winning public speaking experience, I can help you reduce your presentation preparatory time by 50%, overcome your fear of public speaking and be completely at ease, deliver your presentations effectively, develop your personal presence with your audience, and apply an innovative way to handle audience questions deftly.

Working closely with you, I provide a customized protocol employing the critical skills and tools you need to create, practice, and deliver excellent technical speeches and presentations.  Let's connect and explore how I can help you become the exceptional speaker you were meant to be.  Please reach out to me at [email protected] or 703-509-4424 for a complimentary discovery call.  Schedule one with me at calendly.com/frankdibartolomeospeaks

© 2026 DiBartolomeo Consulting International (DCI), LLC. All Rights Reserved. May not be used without permission.

"Trust is equal parts character and competence. You can look at any leadership failure, and it's always a failure of one or the other." -- Stephen Covey, American author, educator, leadership consultant, and businessman

Senior executives often decide within the first few minutes whether a presentation deserves their attention. 

They are evaluating not only the technical content but also the speaker's credibility, confidence, and ability to communicate business value. 

Engineers who establish trust early are far more likely to influence decisions, secure resources, and gain executive support. 

Below are three ways you can earn executive trust in the first five minutes of your presentation.

References

• Gallo, C. (2014). Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World's Top Minds. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press.
• Duarte, N. (2012). HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.
• Reynolds, G. (2019). Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (3rd ed.). Berkeley, CA: New Riders.  
• Mollick, E. (2024). Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. New York, NY: Portfolio. 
• Kotter, J. P. (2012). Leading Change. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. 

© 2026 DiBartolomeo Consulting International (DCI), LLC. All Rights Reserved. May not be used without permission.