April 2020 - Sean Robinson Consulting

Quick and dirty dependency map automation

horizontal neon lights — Photo by H Shaw on Unsplash

After some of my recent articles on building a dependency map, a few people got in touch asking for tips on actually creating them. Here’s a quick way to get started.

You might have noticed the following example in my previous posts.

I created the graphic above with an amazing bit of kit called Neo4j. It’s actually an incredibly sophisticated graph database technology, so it almost feels a little sacrilegious to be using it for this.

9 Common Retrospective Pitfalls

woman placing sticky notes on wall during a retrospective — Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash

I’ve written a few heavy articles recently, so thought I’d take a step back with something a little lighter. I absolutely love retrospectives and am going to take this time to highlight some common retrospective pitfalls that I frequently see people falling into.

Facilitation for Introverts

Why should we care about facilitation for introverts? What does it actually matter? Let’s run through it.

“[…]someone who prefers calm, minimally stimulating environments.”

noun

I sat there in the audience, gazing up at the exuberant figure breathing life and energy into the room. New to facilitation, I felt anxious just watching him play the room. I could see how the content was broken up with quick questions to the audience, group activities helped to encourage engagement from everyone. Engagement, that seemed important. If I was going to be good, then I needed to get everyone involved somehow.

For the past few years, I’ve sought to hone my craft at facilitation. Engagement has been a driving force for how I structure my content and a measure for how successful I feel that I’ve been. I felt that if everyone was active in some way, then that’s a quantitative measure of success, right?

Dependency Map Analysis

pen on paper showing a graph — Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash

If you’re not up to speed on the concept of dependency mapping, then I’d suggest taking a look at my previous post where I talked through how to go about building a dependency map.

So what happens now? You’ve gone through the workshop and now have a bunch of data that’s telling you what? Something about your system? I’m going to run through some of the actions I take when attempting to understand a dependency map.