Personas
Collaboration
FinOps is inherently about collaboration. The key to the FinOps practice is the need to support a variety of different personas across the business. The FinOps team does not need to have all of the skills of each persona. Rather, they should work to build connections between personas as the FinOps culture becomes ingrained in the organization. FinOps teams also work to ensure the right people in the organization have the information they need to do their specific jobs.
FinOps Driver:
- Leadership
- Product Owner
- Finance
- Procurement
- Engineering
- Each persona represents a different discipline or perspective on the business
- Each persona brings their own particular motivations and backgrounds to the discussion
- Each persona brings important skills and abilities to the successful practice of FinOps
The FinOps team should be focused on providing information specific to and useful to each of these personas. Cloud cost and usage data may be a very deep and broad set of data about an organization’s services. However, a big part of what is done in data analysis and showback, chargeback, budgeting, forecasting, and in the organization alignment domain can be customized and tailored to the needs of the audience. The FinOps team can do more than simply provide “all the data.”
Personas Across the Organization
An important soft skill of a FinOps team is understanding how to serve each persona. Every persona has different interests (cost versus usage, applications versus services, scope, KPIs, etc.).
Let’s refer back to the FinOps principle: everyone is responsible for their cloud usage. Personas cannot be responsible without good information. Good information must come from all groups who use cloud being able to see, in near real time, what they are using. This enables them to optimize as they go and build responsibly. The FinOps team must ensure everyone takes the responsibility for their cloud usage seriously.
Every organization will have specific personas that outline the roles and responsibilities of specific groups in the organization. For example, government entities often have very strong procurement or contract management personas due to the many contract restrictions on government purchasing. In another example, traditional IT companies might have an ITAM persona who works with the FinOps team. Other organizations may have neither of these and the finance persona will handle these responsibilities. Take some time to determine who the personas in your organization are and define how the FinOps team will support each.
FinOps Personas
Implementing the FinOps Framework requires you to work together with the FinOps Personas in your organization. And all the personas involved in FinOps will benefit from understanding the Framework’s operating model. Operating within the FinOps Framework requires finding allies in times of change, defining a common language, building enablement strategies to elevate, and developing communication programs. The practice of Finops is more than a technology solution or a checklist you hand to your teams.
FinOps Practitioner
FinOps practitioners bridge business, IT and Finance teams by enabling evidence-based decisions in near-real time to help optimize cloud use and increase business value. They focus on establishing a FinOps culture and enabling stakeholder teams by demonstrating a working knowledge of the Principles and Capabilities of the FinOps Framework, a prescriptive model of actions and best practices.
Executives
Executives, such as a VP/Head of Infrastructure, Head of Cloud Center of Excellence, CTO, or CIO, focus on driving accountability and building transparency, ensuring teams are being efficient, and not exceeding budgets.
Business/Product Owner
These participants are usually Business and Product Owner team members, such as a Director of Cloud Optimization, Cloud Analyst, or Business Operations Manager.
Engineering and Operations
Engineers and Ops team members, such as Lead Software Engineers, Principal Systems Engineers, Cloud Architects, Service Delivery Managers, Engineering Managers, or Directors of Platform Engineering, focus on building and supporting services for the organization. Cost is introduced as a metric in the same way that other performance metrics are tracked and monitored. Members of these teams consider the efficient design and use of resources via activities like rightsizing (the process of resizing cloud resources to better match the workload requirements), allocating container costs, finding unused storage and compute, and identifying whether spending anomalies are expected.
Finance
Finance members, including Financial Planners, Financial Analysts, Financial Business Managers/Advisors, use the reporting provided by the FinOps team for cost allocation, showback allocation, and forecasting. They work closely with FinOps practitioners to understand historic billing data so that they can collaborate and build accurate forecasting models used for planning and budgeting.
Procurement
Procurement Analysts, Sourcing analysts, Vendor Management or Directors within Procurement teams use insights provided by the FinOps team for identifying sourcing and purchasing of product and services within a Cloud Platform Vendor. Procurement should work closely with FinOps to ensure that prices and terms negotiated in the contract are fulfilled and streamline the procurement process. Procurement may have a legal component to review contract language.
ITAM Leader / Practitioner
ITAM team members such as IT Asset Manager, Software Asset Manager, IT Asset Analyst, IT Asset Administrator, IT Asset Specialist, IT Asset Compliance Manager, and IT Asset Procurement Specialist focus on maximizing the business value of all assets in the organization. It is also their responsibility to manage risk related to asset optimization and contract compliance. They work closely with other IT professionals, including Architecture, Engineering and Security and stakeholders to develop and implement effective IT asset management strategies that align with the organization’s goals and objectives.
Adopting FinOps: Understanding Executive Personas
When proposing the adoption of a FinOps function within an organization, there will be a need to brief a variety of personas among the executive team to gain approval, buy-in, and involvement in conducting FinOps and achieving its goals.
Each Executive team persona is described below, in terms of their goals, concerns, key messaging and useful KPIs. By understanding the motivations of each executive persona, a FinOps champion will be able to describe the value of FinOps more effectively, minimizing the time and effort to gain alignment. Please see the main Adopting FinOps section for more context.
FinOps Practitioner
Primary Goal:
Drive best practices into the organization through education, standardization, and cultural growth and support.
Objectives
- Cultural change flag bearer
- Create cloud cost management best practices
- Create benchmarks for teams to use
- Create visibility and transparency to cloud cost
- Create or inform cloud budgets and forecasts
Challenges
- Lack of access to needed data
- Distributed accountability
- Building adoption at enterprise scale
- Tool reliance that does not deliver capabilities needed
Key Metrics
- Accurate budgets
- Accurate forecasts
- Unit Cost Economics
- Discount/Reservation coverage
- Percentage untagged resources
- Efficiency opportunity
FinOps Benefits
- Centralized cloud cost management in single cloud or multi-cloud environment
- Align accountability to cloud users
- Build confidence around budgets and forecasts
- Advance communication throughout the organization
CEO
Primary Goal:
Assurance that cloud investments are aligned with business objectives.
Objectives
- Accelerate Company Growth YoY
- Strategic Competitive Advantage
- Faster time-to-market
- Deliver innovative, market leading solutions cost effectively
Challenges
- Unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, cloud spend
- Unable to see link between engineering initiatives and business objectives
- Unsure of the return on their company’s cloud investment
Key Metrics
- Revenue Growth
- Gross Margins
- COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
- Unit Cost Economics
FinOps Benefits
- Manage risk
- Connect engineering decisions with business outcomes
- Predict how cloud spend will grow as the business grows
- Guide organization to make good cloud investments
CTO / CIO
Primary Goal:
Leverage technology to give the business a market and competitive advantage.
Objectives
- Accelerate Company Growth YoY
- Strategic Competitive Advantage
- Faster time-to-market
- Deliver innovative, market leading solutions cost effectively
Challenges
- Extreme pressure to either justify or bring the cloud bill down
- No guardrails on spend
- Unsatisfied engineers
- Business continuity
- Reliability
Key Metrics
- Revenue Growth
- Gross Margins
- COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
- Unit Cost Economics
- Time to market for new features/product
- Engineering productivity
- Track R&D vs. Production spend
- Maintain operations within budget
FinOps Benefits
- Predict how cloud spend will grow as the business grows
- Drive organization to make good cloud investments
- Enable engineering organizations to gain more freedom to utilize newer cloud technologies and deliver solutions to market faster
CFO
Primary Goal:
Manage the cost of cloud utilization (among other costs across the org) and ensuring that money is wisely spent.
Objectives
- Cost visibility and granularity, and accuracy
- Overall cost-per-unit / COGS reduction
- Managing costs during growth, disproportionate cost reduction during flat/declining periods
Challenges
- Unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, cloud spend
- Unsure of the return on their company’s cloud investment
- Cost fluctuations and innovation do not align to budgeting cycles
Key Metrics
- Revenue Growth
- Gross Margins
- COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
- Unit Cost Economics
- Predictability
FinOps Benefits
- Increased accountability for cloud cost
- Increased reliance on budget and forecast models
- Direct impact on company bottom line
Product Owner
Primary Goal:
Quickly bring new products and features to market with an accurate price point.
Objectives
- Accelerate Product Growth YoY
- Decrease time to market
- Deliver innovative, market leading solutions cost effectively
Challenges
- Unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, cloud spend
- Cannot predict the costs closely enough for new features and products resulting in pricing misses
- Cannot predict how costs will change when launching existing products in new regions/markets
Key Metrics
- Revenue Growth
- Gross Margins
- COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
- Unit Cost Economics – Cost per customer, Cost per product/feature
FinOps Benefits
- Manage risk
- Connect product decisions with business outcomes
- Predict how much cloud infrastructure will factor into feature/ product price
- Guide team to make good cloud investments
Engineering Lead
Primary Goal:
Deliver faster and high quality services to the organisation, whilst maintaining business as usual.
Objectives
- Drive accountability to engineering teams that are responsible for the application/services.
- Provide guidance to engineering teams to have a cost-effective application/service by identifying anomalies and best practices.
- Work together with engineering teams to identify rate reductions and possible cost avoidance
- Cost allocation
Challenges
- Unsatisfied engineers as their workload keeps rising.
- Long delivery cycles
- Cannot predict the impact on the budget
- Difficult to identify service or application ownership
- Cannot predict the costs closely enough for developing new features and products.
Key Metrics
- Revenue by infrastructure costs
- Cost per deployed service & service utilisation rates
- Showback & Chargeback of IT costs to the business
FinOps Benefits
- Increased visibility to cloud cost
- Connection to cloud cost and unit economics
- More accountability for utilization
- Incentive towards solid architecture principles to factor efficiency
IT Finance Manager
Primary Goal:
Accurately budget, forecast, and report cloud costs.
Objectives
- Cost out and budget maintenance
- Prepare accurate forecasts
- Report actual costs and trends
- Normalize spend predictability
Challenges
- Unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, cloud spend
- Frustrated team as cloud cost accountability is distributed
- Challenges with legacy finance models (cap-ex vs op-ex)
Key Metrics
- Revenue Growth
- Gross Margins
- COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
- Unit Cost Economics
- Budget and forecast transparency and accuracy
- Policy compliance
FinOps Benefits
- Identify unallocated spend
- Facilitate showback/chargebacks to increase financial accountability
- Drive budget and forecast accuracy
- Guide team to make good cloud investments
Procurement
Primary Goal:
Cloud platform relationship management.
Objectives
- Negotiate the best win-win cloud contract
- Exercise enterprise discount / volume commitment programs
- Manage relationship with Cloud platform provider
Challenges
- Lack of visibility to cloud cost data
- Lack of centralized process for cloud commitments
Key Metrics
- Software license optimization
- Cost per license
- Utilization of licenses per team
- Cost or IT Spend per Vendor to provide possible consolidation opportunities
FinOps Benefits
- Obtain the best cloud cost rates available
- Translate billing data to activity based costing
- Provide visibility and enable understanding of cost per technology license and contracts
ITAM Leader / Practitioner
Primary Goal:
Ensure that all IT assets are being used to their fullest potential and that the organization is getting the best value for its investments in IT. Also ensuring that the organization is fully compliant with all licensing and regulatory requirements.
Objectives
- Maintain an inventory of all assets
- Manage and support all contracts and agreements, ensuring compliance with all licenses
- Develop and implement the asset management strategy
- Manage relationships with internal and other external stakeholders
- Monitor and report asset performance and implement strategies for improvement of performance, mitigation of risks and creation of value
- Prepare and approve operational plans and budgets and control and analyze the performance of operating assets against approved budgets/forecasts
Challenges
- Lack of visibility of assets (cloud, licenses, SaaS)
- Overspend and/or over-utilization due to a lack of visibility
- Difficult to manage complex contracts and matching entitlement with actual assets
- Inventory of IT assets can be manual, time-consuming, and almost instantly out of date
- Inability to double-check numbers in the event of an audit
- Lack of awareness by engineering teams of existing license entitlements
Key Metrics
- Inventory coverage %
- Unlicensed software count/cost
- Value/usage of license optimizations
- Usage/compliance audit counts/cost
- Asset inventory accuracy
- % underutilized installations
- % of installations end of support/end of life
FinOps Benefits
- Access to real-time, detailed cloud cost and marketplace usage data
- Visibility into discovered cloud assets
- Visibility for the purpose of license compliance or risk management (i.e. containerized environments or marketplace purchases)
- Identification of cloud assets where BYOL can be applied
Teams
A FinOps Team
For an organization to successfully adopt cloud, adopt the FinOps principles, generate best practices, and satisfy the needs of the diverse set of stakeholder personas, it needs a FinOps Team. The FinOps team is not a gatekeeper, but a facilitator which brings a unique set of skills and information to the organization to help it adopt a FinOps culture and more successfully drive value from their use of cloud.
A FinOps Team’s Primary Actions
Push Accountability Through the Organization
- FinOps requires that we extend accountability to the edges of the organization, where the commitment to purchase now resides. FinOps teams empower feature and product teams to manage their own usage of cloud against their budget. Note that every persona does not have to watch everything, the FinOps team can focus on providing curated information to meet a persona’s needs.
Centralized Rate & Discount Optimization
- The FinOps team itself centrally governs and controls: Committed Use Discounts, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and Volume/Custom Discounts with Cloud Providers (FinOps principle: a centralized team drives FinOps).
The FinOps team is looking at the macro consumption by regions, instance types, and will have insights into both product development and executive strategic planning. This is a specific job individuals within a FinOps team do themselves by analyzing, getting commit sign-off, procurement authorization, and executing.
Building a FinOps Team
FinOps teams are as diverse as company organization structures and there seems to be no one way for how to build or run a FinOps team. Here are some key questions to ask when getting started.
- Who should be on a FinOps team?
- What roles should we look for?
- How many people should be on a FinOps team?
- Where should the FinOps team report in the org chart?
- What are the barriers to effectiveness?
Team Structure Examples
- Most FinOps teams start with someone part-time who has other job roles and then evolves from there.
- In a less complex organization, a dedicated team can be the central point for all activities.
- In a more complex organization, or one that has inconsistent use case across business units, a fully matrixed organization might be a better model, giving each unit more autonomy. For example, this might be a good model for a private equity company which expects each unit to be bought or sold independently, and only wants loose coordination across them.
- Fidelity speaks publicly about their “hub and spoke” team structure which has each of their six large-scale cloud-using business units (BU) contributing a person to a core team. This core team performs the FinOps function for the organization as a whole (central RI purchasing, etc.) and then those people also represent and promote FinOps within their BU. They have long-term credibility, an in-depth knowledge of the specific needs of the business unit (all of which have very different cloud use cases), and they can drive that with their users. The centralized FinOps team has a shared understanding of FinOps, its value to the overall organization, and the benefits of the shared functions to the company as a whole.
State of FinOps Data: Teams
The State of FinOps survey report (opens in a new tab) is meant to be a living snapshot of the industry. We continue to collect additional responses from our membership and update this report as new insights come in.
In 2019, FinOps members identified the following common roles that existed on FinOps teams.
- CPA/Finance Professionals
- Change Management/Org Design Specialist
- Cloud Architects
- FinOps Proactioners
- Educator/Trainer/Marketer
- Engineer/Automation Developer
- Capacity Planner/Forecasting Specialist
- Evengelist
- Financial Analysis
- Data Analyst/Big Data Analyst
- Technical Writer/Communication
Team Sizes scale as maturity develops: average team size in 2021 was 7
- Crawl
- Current team size = 3
- 12-months from now = 6
- Walk
- Current team size = 5
- 12-month from now = 8
- Run
- Current team size = 9
- 12-month from now = 14
Team size seems to hinge on complexity of cloud use ($10M a year on one SaaS product is easier than $5M a year on 50 applications) and complexity of company (multi-BU, multinational, dozens of apps, five levels of management all complicates things).
Most often FinOps sits where the problem started in an organization, and it should then move to wherever the coordination point is to continue doing it.
| Location of FinOps Team | Pros / Cons |
| CIO | May have more sway with engineers; may not be aligned fully with finance, who watches the watchers |
| CFO | May be overly focused on cost savings, may not have support of engineers |
| Procurement | May be too low in the organization to be effective, may have the best view as to all avenues for cost savings, right mindset |
| IT Finance | May not have the skills or experience to think broadly about finance topics, may be closer to engineering teams |
| CEO | This should be a cooperative effort, not jammed down from above, but high level focus and push can make it effective immediately |
| Strategic Initiative | Ultimately cloud and FinOps are standard operating procedure, so if strategic, plan to find a permanent home for it soon |
| CTO | Worry about FinOps seeming like it’s all about new things, technology change, again look for a permanent home ultimately |