Taking a look back over the last ten years in enterprise technology, paradigm shifts are occurring more frequently. For example, the maturity of DevOps/Platform Engineering and Cloud Native infrastructure has occurred. The new frontier depending where you are in adoption is AI. As your adoption and maturity curve progress, operationalizing these paradigms become important. Many sophisticated firms that have to manage and even innovate paradigms that are possibly not core to their business model look to Product Portfolio Management aka PPM to manage the business aspect of the paradigm.
A core pillar to PPM is resource management or the management of skillsets across the portfolio. We looked inwards to our own Professional Service team and ran a Job Task Analysis aka JTA to analyze how Harness itself built a portfolio of implementation experts.
For organizations/firms looking not only to scale Harness but potentially other platforms or paradigms, can use the Harness Implementation Job Task Analysis as one framework to use and apply to your specific need.
Remember Your Org’s DevOps Adoption?
In 2026, it is exciting to say that DevOps is mature. Most in industry agree today to the pillars and practices of what DevOps has been trying to achieve are normal for most engineering orgs. If you turn the clock back 15 years ago, DevOps was still very much emerging as a paradigm. The trio of people, process, and technology followed as the movement became more mature.
In an early episode of ShipTalk, we talked to Nidhi Allipuram, who at the time was leading a DevOps Org at a large insurance company. In the episode we talked about how she went from 0-1 in scaling a DevOps idea to building a DevOps Org. Like any technology adoption with a new or fast moving paradigm (think of AI today), there are business considerations that typically follow the maturity curve. The process she followed was incremental starting to gather internal expertise then having to answer “is this problem even worth solving”. From there once momentum is made, scale will follow.
The episode was great timing, for myself I was becoming a new first-time manager here at Harness and Harness itself was turning into a multi-module platform. I was really curious about how she load-balanced skills on her team to continue to expand into an evolving paradigm. Her advice was solid that you do have to balance the team to grow complementary skillsets and be able to keep up with their internal customer demand. This is exactly what resource management in a PPM based discipline/org would strive for. The Job Task Analysis that was just concluded can be used in resource management when looking to scale the program/portfolio.
Harness Implementation Job Task Analysis - Hard and Soft Skills
Looking at the Implementation Job Task Analysis and how Harness itself scales our Professional Services Practice, there is a needed mixture of both hard and soft skills. The hard skills are vertical skills in the tooling/platforms/ecosystem that Harness participates in. Second and just as important are the soft skills around problem solving and requirements gathering / stakeholder management. The hard skills would answer the “how” and “where” type of questions. The soft skills will answer just as importantly the “why” and “what” type of questions. As Harness is a platform of outcomes, solving for both hard and soft skills is important.
Extrapolating this to building a portfolio or program in evolving or even mature technology domains, the soft skills bolster the initial organic question “is this problem even worth solving”. In technology there is rarely a singular big-bang type of innovation occurrence. A good amount of innovation happens incrementally and with a solid team/consensus driven approach. Getting consensus can also be a challenge and a typical approach is requirements/stakeholder management gathering inputs from many points-of-view and blending them for trade-offs.
Distilling down the findings in the Implementation Job Task Analysis, for highly technical resources stakeholder / requirements management can be challenging as there is a lot of grey area. For example in the Site Reliability Engineering aka SRE world, defining your SLIs/SLOs is one set of challenges but having to get consensus to renegotiate them is a different order of problem. As we look towards AI, the fundamentals do not go away.
Well What About AI?
AI is certainly a rapidly evolving paradigm that is rapidly changing how we use technology. In a recent Cloud Native Podcast where the topic was Generative AI in Platform Engineering. AI, especially how it is used in Platform Engineering, is still early in the adoption curve. In 2026, The Linux Foundation will have its first AI centric conference with AGNTCon + MCPCon which is telling that maturity will eventually arrive. With items that are either early or late maturity, fundamentals do not go away.
On the Cloud Native Podcast, there was a conversation around how Kubernetes was during the first KubeCon in 2015 and how AGNTCon + MCPCon is a telling similar signal in 2026. The panel in the podcast reflected on their own K8s journey and early questions around innovation vs control/operationalization came up when looking towards AI; similar concerns when looking at K8s early on.
Crucial to navigating the radio dials of innovation vs control is again the fundamentals of soft skills getting stakeholder or internal customer alignment which is by incremental consensus. In the Implementation Job Task Analysis, the people who are agents of change in software delivery need to blend both their hard and soft skills on a daily basis. These very people are available to help further your innovation goals with top notch software delivery via the Harness Platform.
Partner with Harness for New Paradigm Expertise
As you start to embrace new paradigms and the Harness Platform, we are here to help. Harness has been at the forefront of the Cloud Native and now AI-Centric software delivery worlds. Our platform continues to evolve to meet these new and similar challenges in the technology adoption curve. Harness Professional Services are the people helping your organization making these new paradigms become reality. Feel free to take a look at our Services Offerings which includes consulting/coaching to training. We are excited to share how we scale our own internal skills to help our customers/partners/and public continue on to better the software delivery craft.
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Ravi Lachhman builds the systems that help platforms scale. Over the past 15+ years, Ravi has worked across distributed systems, open source, DevOps, and enterprise modernization. Today his focus sits at the intersection of product, ecosystem, and revenue, turning complex platforms into durable adoption engines. Ravi has led developer advocacy, product initiatives, partner programs, and certification strategies in high-growth environments. He cares deeply about technical credibility and alignment across product, sales, and services so adoption is not accidental, but intentional and measurable. At his core, Ravi is a systems thinker who enjoys operating where product, field, and community intersect.
