March 2020 - Sean Robinson Consulting

Self care when working from home

A working from home setup. MacBook Pro, white ceramic mug,and black smartphone on table — Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

There’s been a deluge of advice on how to survive working from home recently. I almost didn’t bother, so as not to add to the noise. But I figured what the hell, even if one other person can be helped then maybe I should.

I’m a consultant, so work from a variety of places. Home is a common one, often for extended periods of time. Working for an excellent company that is remote first, DevOpsGroup, has given me plenty of time to perfect my pattern. Here are my tips on looking after yourself when confined to the house.

Dependency Mapping

A large number of coloured cables plugged into a machine.

Recently, I published an article where I discussed the concept of dependency as a proxy for complexity. I also tried to show that complexity is the biggest aspect to consider when attempting to improve the flow of value. This is all part of a concept I call Dependency Mapping.

Following publication of the article, I had a few people who read it on LinkedIn reach out for some advice on actually doing it in their place of work. In this article I will dig deeper into the process by which we can start to map out dependencies. With the map completed, we can then work to remove them.

Dependency maps are going to be messy as they try and convey a huge amount of information. We’ll aim small, and then offer some suggestions for improvement from there.

Why complexity is killing your business

dependent adjective

de· pen· dent | \ di-ˈpen-dənt \

determined or conditioned by another

If you ask 10 people why Digital Transformations fail, you’ll get 10 different answers, often with phrases like “buy-in” and “culture” thrown around. Although there isn’t a simple answer to this question, I’d like to talk about one that often gets ignored. Dependencies.

You have a dependency if something is contingent on another, here are some examples:

“Getting this work complete is contingent on the tests passing.”
“We need the platform team to spin up a test environment before we can run the tests.”
“We need to have sign-off before we can allocate time to create the instance.”