RE: depicting inter-dependent entities

["McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

> -----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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