RE: depicting inter-dependent entities

Subject: RE: depicting inter-dependent entities
From: "McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>
To: Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 26 May 2011 09:39:13 -0400



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gene Kim-Eng [mailto:techwr -at- genek -dot- com]
>
> In most of the companies I've worked for, we did it with flow charts.
> However, during my brief stint in consumer electronics last year, I
> discovered that people trying to set up things they find under their
> Xmas trees often go into a fugue state when confronted with flow
> charts. We used Flash animations instead.

Yeah, and when we advance from command-line-only, that
will become a possibility. Until then, I guess I'm
looking for suggestions as to the optimum presentation
(there are dozens of flow-chart options in Visio,
for example, as well as mind-map and other squiggly
ways to show things interacting) - what would be the
visual thingie that would most clearly show a bunch
of interdependencies.

There's not that much extended "flow" to show, as in
progressing from action to decision to action to
decision, and so on. Instead, I want to show how
a bunch of settings on a bunch of systems - several
of them optional - can affect and constrain each other.

That is, you can set them up in pretty-much any
chronological order, but when you start using,
you might find that this-or-that part times out
before another part can complete a task, or that
in your attempt to prevent that happening, you've
allowed the overall process to take so long that
you are experiencing a productivity hit.

I'm thinking of going to the local art shop and
buying some onion-skin paper or acetate, and drawing
each relationship on a separate layer, then stacking
to see what the whole thing looks like. I'm
anticipating spaghetti and meatballs.

- k
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Follow-Ups:

References:
depicting inter-dependent entities: From: McLauchlan, Kevin
Re: depicting inter-dependent entities: From: Gene Kim-Eng

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