Cognos 10 Product Demonstartion

[Sep2013]

Hi all,

I have been asked to do a " Cognos 10.2 product Demonstartion" .
Does anyone has ideas or suggestions since i have never given a product demo before.

[MFGF]

Hi,

Who is the audience and what issues/problems do they have that the Cognos software can deliver solutions to? There is no point doing a feature/function demo to an audience of business people who have never seen the product before, and likewise a high-level overview is not going to go down well with an audience of highly skilled Cognos 8 developers who need an update.

Cheers!

MF.

[Sep2013]

thanks :)

the demo is for self service reporting capabilities for business user and advanced user.
Attached is the requirememts of the demo.

Please help me with ideas to present these functionalities in most elegant way

[MFGF]

Hi,

That's a pretty big list! What it doesn't tell you, though, is what business issue(s) the client has that you are trying to prove Cognos can help them with. It's a list of feature/function requirements. Feature/function demos are rarely a good idea with a business user audience. The only audience you might get away with it with is a technical IT-oriented group.

In your position, I would be talking to the sales person who arranged the demo/POC and I would be asking him/her to articulate the business pains we are trying to address. If he/she can't to that, I would be suggesting a discovery meeting with the client to find out.

Once you know the business requirements to address, the next big challenge is to figure out a believable story you can present. Generally you will be trying to reinforce the "How are we doing" and "Why is this happening" answer delivery in Cognos 10, so having a believable path through the demo and data to support your story is important. Maybe you start in an Active Report to show high level details including at least one key issue you can focus on, drill through to a Cognos Workspace where you can investigate further and bring in extra widgets to add more info to the situation, then show "do more" in Cognos Workspace Advanced to show analysis and discovery capabilities and understand the issue. You might finish in Cognos Office showing the report you built in a PowerPoint presentation.  This is just an idea, though, and what you actually show and how it flows will be driven by the business requirements.

If you just go ahead and try to show what's in your attached list I suspect the demo will not go well - certainly not to a business user audience. They will need to be able to relate what you show them to how they do their jobs. They will need to see enough value in the solution to think "I really need this". If not, they won't buy - why would they?

Good luck!

MF.