Are YOU Game?

... and the Lord said, 'let their be light...' yeah and in that moment of enlightenment I could now very clearly see some anti-patterns in my behavior. Let us try and understand the same. Let's say you are pretty very well educated, you have a decent job, you are considered a 'potential' candidate to handle most challenging assignments in your organization and you dream big. But.. and a big one there to be precise, more often than not, you hit a big wall somewhere along the way. You can get something going, but it does not go very far. We have no idea how many times we end up stuck in second gear for the rest of our lives. While we may be “good enough” we could be so much better.

Yes, I wanted to talk about 'Scalability' as much as this concept is borrowed from Software Engineering I plan to adopt it in my day to day life.

"Scalability is a desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged.[1] For example, it can refer to the capability of a system to increase total throughput under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added. An analogous meaning is implied when the word is used in a commercial context, where scalability of a company implies that the underlying business model offers the potential for economic growth within the company.

An algorithm, design, networking protocol, program, or other system is said to scale if it is suitably efficient and practical when applied to large situations (e.g. a large input data set or large number of participating nodes in the case of a distributed system). If the design fails when the quantity increases then it does not scale." - Source: wikipedia

Now scalability has multiple facets to understand;

• 'Scale Out' - Diversify your horizon of understanding, often I have observed that concepts from seemingly unrelated subjects, an example in case the recent rage with Web 2.0 where concepts from Sociology and Technology is gainfully employed to conduct 'Viral Marketing' for businesses. "Tell-A-Friend" widget from Pramati which you see on my blog is niche area platform product operating in this space. It definitely helps to find/create new opportunities if you can apply your diverse knowledge to add value to the society at large. Another way to scale out is to play multiple roles in your team to gain first hand understanding of issues at hand. It may be an enriching experience if you can mix-match-employ your experience with solving engineering problems and handling customer situations.

• 'Scale Up' - Based upon your analysis of the situation you feel it just right to add extra effort.. walk that extra mile to achieve 'customer delight'. [here, customer is overloaded for both the internal and external customer behavior]

• 'Scale Down' - Last but not the least, it is important for us to identify and 'scale down' things which are not working. Things which might become too big a problem while one is trying to scale...
  

With that understanding of issues with me.. I want to ask myself if I'm Game enough to leave my footprint on the third rock from Sun? Game enough to tackle the challenging technology? Game enough to get my game on the planet. I believe I can.. Come on! double up now... faster, higher, stronger.. be a sport :)