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How to Create a High-Visibility FinOps Dashboard at SAP

Contributed by Genevieve B. of SAP.

Internship Overview

Project Title Reporting and Benchmarking: Creating a High-Visibility FinOps Dashboard
Internship Title Finance Data Analyst Intern
Education Status Part-time – Information Science Master’s Degree (MLIS)
Department Joined Cloud Asset and Risk Management Team (Operations)
FinOps Capabilities Data Analysis and Showback
Period of Internship 3 months (for this project specifically)
Lifecycle Inform

Project Description

Background

The team reports on Cloud costs and savings on a regular basis to teams across the organization. Effective dashboards are essential for communicating the status of accounts and savings that the team has been facilitating.

Problem Statement

Executive level reporting does not tell a story and limits the awareness of KPIs facilitated by the team.

Scope

Learn the internal tool (SAP Analytics Cloud) used for reporting. Survey stakeholders to gather feedback on current reporting. Compile feedback and present options for revising reporting. Use feedback to create a dashboard that satisfies leadership and promotes team efforts. Document all efforts.

Out of Scope

Data wrangling, data model creation/maintenance, data ingestion. All vital for reporting and data visualizations. All in existence prior to project start.

Internship Summary

Key Tasks

  1. Learn SAP Analytics Cloud tool enough to get started building dashboards
  2. Work with peer mentor to learn areas of business
  3. Read through and understand the results of previous survey of stakeholders
  4. Meet with each stakeholder to verify their feedback
  5. Present concepts to manager that take stakeholder feedback into account
  6. Enter dashboard lifecycle:
    1. Enter creation stage:
      1. Create version of dashboard
      2. Present dashboard and compile feedback
      3. Revise dashboard
      4. Repeat until manager is satisfied
    2. Enter maintenance stage
    3. Create and maintain documentation

Tools Used

  • SAP Analytics Cloud
  • Microsoft suite

Skills Used

  • Cross-functional communication
  • Data visualization methods
  • Ability to learn new tools very fast
  • Self-starter and resourcefulness

Personas Interacted With

  • Executives
  • Product Owners
  • Engineering and Operations teams
  • FinOps Practitioners

Key Discoveries

Balancing levels of detail such that there is FinOps reporting relevant to both analysts and leadership requires flexible dashboard design and the ability to make the decision to have more than one dashboard.

Learning & Development Plan

Mentor

Manager met as needed (daily to once weekly). Peer mentor assigned.

Certification

No certification achieved during internship

Tools

SAC

 

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