Maturing Your FinOps
One of the consequences of the change from building IT infrastructure to consuming IT infrastructure is that the job never ends. As you become more experienced in FinOps, you will find that there is so much left to learn. The challenges become more complex or varied; they can be brought on by changes in how your organization uses cloud, what services are available from cloud providers, and by the needs of your maturing organization and team. As a FinOps practitioner, you will be helping to drive the culture change your organization needs to get the most value out of your cloud use. This means your team will need to adapt over time as well.
Evolutionary Build
Dann Berg, the leader of the NYC meetup and FinOps Ambassador, talked about the evolution of his team at his last two companies as being an evolutionary build.
At first, the team builds a visibility capability, then brings on someone to operationalize it. Learning and communications are next, the mechanisms are established and then someone steps in to carry it forward.
Optimization activities that are important then get built and someone comes on to continue those activities. Over time, some of the earlier functions may become routine, established within the broader organization, or carried out by other teams. In the best cases, these earlier functions become automated away or made obsolete by the good behavior of the organization. As new functions for the FinOps team are established, the team grows and changes to accommodate the new work.
Building Success
- FinOps team leadership is critical to making the team successful
- No one knows all of the ins and outs of FinOps from a single engagement. Use your resources, like the FinOps Foundation, to provide edge cases and outside perspectives
- Regularly and routinely step back, look at how the FinOps team is fulfilling the principles and the organization’s goals, then adjust
- Recognize that the team’s jobs and functions will change, sometimes dramatically, over time. Hire and grow with a mix of people who are flexible, broadly skilled, curious problem solvers as well as operationally minded and who can promote change and development from the team
- You need to manage the FinOps team as a thing, the same way a marketing team needs to manage the team of people doing marketing and the marketing function’s effectiveness. They are intertwined but distinct functions and there is merit in focusing on the value that having a FinOps team brings to the organization and then managing it, and managing what it delivers
Achieving Results
The KPIs that the FinOps team is asked to deliver will also change over time. When an organization is first starting to do FinOps, the returns on work tend to be very large because there is a lot of inefficiency which can be addressed by taking fairly simple steps.
Over time, the work that will be required increases – both the mechanics of doing the cost optimization and the number of people who will need to be involved in making the changes. The relatively large inefficiencies that once existed are now corrected, leaving smaller incremental improvements. However, without the consistent work of the FinOps team to promote efficiency, and the culture change to bring it on board, there can be a quick backslide into inefficient practices.
Revisit the KPIs for the FinOps team as it evolves to make sure the value is aligned with what is being produced and the team is focused on the right things to create sustaining value for the organization.
Activity: Elevator Pitch
Think about how you can incorporate what you’ve learned in this course into your own work when you return. You’re about to become a certified FinOps practitioner! When you meet your CIO and they ask “What does this FinOps thing mean for us?” What is your elevator pitch? What will you say?
Examples
- Cloud FinOps will enable us to drive business value/innovation for financial accountability through increased visibility and transparency as we better understand unit economics. This will help us to balance speed, cost and quality, and to make smart business decisions. Cloud FinOps also brings the business together to collaborate in the best interest of the business, working towards common goals, and building a common culture.
- FinOps helps us identify and drive value for cloud across the organization. With FinOps, we can improve our understanding of cost allocations and make informed decisions about tradeoffs. Further, using FinOps, we can drive alignment between IT, the business, and finance to ensure the best possible uses of our resources.
- FinOps is a cultural change that will transform the organization into one with robust and agile control over its cloud provisioning and spending.
- FinOps means cloud structure understanding and innovation to provide our organization with the direction we need to make improvements and provide more value to our teams and ultimately our customers.
State of FinOps Data
As you mature your FinOps practice, you will face different challenges. At first, forecasting and adoption may be the top challenges. As you become more mature, getting engineers to take action will become more of an issue. As your maturity increases you will have overcome some of the early challenges and begin to work on more complex tasks around reducing waste and automation.
What’s Next
Recap
So that’s it. You are using FinOps principles to help your company move to the cloud. You’ve built a team that fosters collaboration and helps you build the FinOps culture of accountability. You are exercising the FinOps lifecycle of Inform, Optimize and Operate every day. You are practicing and maturing your team’s ability in the FinOps capabilities bringing your company value. Now keep at it!
Self Assessment
After completing the course material and before returning to your organization, answer the following questions:
- What is your elevator pitch once you return to your organization?
- How will you use the FinOps Principles?
- Where is your organization now?
- What are your challenges?
- Where do you want to go from here?
- How are you going to get there?
The FinOps Foundation Community
If you are interested in continuing the journey, join the FinOps Foundation at https://www.finops.org/membership/
. The FinOps Foundation offers:
- A community of FinOps practitioners
- Shared Slack channels for discussions
- Monthly meetings with industry experts and FinOps leaders
- A FinOps ambassador program
- TAC and governing board leadership positions
- FinOps Professional and Persona-based training
Get Involved
- Join the FinOps Foundation community to access Slack
- Learn from others via real world community stories and the FinOps Podcast
- Find help adopting FinOps
- Gain insights on encouraging engineers to take action
- Learn about vendors in our community
- Need additional support? Reach us know at hello@finops.org
- Questions about training? Contact us at training@finops.org