FinOps Education & Enablement

Framework / Domains / Manage the FinOps Practice / FinOps Education & Enablement

Training, skill development, and practical activities that enable teams throughout the organization to adopt and deliver the FinOps practice.

Ensure organizational Alignment

Define and document training or enablement needs by persona
Define and document training or enablement needs by team
Coordinate with organizational training and development programs
Coordinate on job definition, skills, role description, or other HR items

Enable training programs

Develop or document internal training or enablement programs
Develop or document external training or enablement programs

Definition

FinOps Education & Enablement allows everyone participating in a FinOps practice to develop a common understanding of FinOps concepts, terminology, and practice. This common understanding helps to enable the collaboration that must occur across disciplines and between all parts of an organization to effectively make decisions in the context of the business value cloud provides.

FinOps Education & Enablement is essential to building an organization’s culture of accountability for cloud costs. The goal of this capability is to deliver FinOps knowledge and skills to all personas while continuously reinforcing FinOps adoption. FinOps Certifications as Certified Practitioner, Engineer, or Professional, and FinOps Persona-based Training courses can provide a baseline understanding of FinOps itself. In addition to this, FinOps teams should include other technical and discipline related skill development to foster collaboration and help everyone in the organization understand more about cloud, the specific cloud providers, services, and offerings the organization is using, and the goals the organization is trying to achieve through cloud use.

This will be done through a combination of:

Internal communications, events, and learning experiences, such as all-hands meetings, FinOps centered internal gatherings or “hackathon” style events, or informal brown-bag type gatherings. Some organizations host regular FinOps Day events, gathering engineering, finance, leadership and product personas regularly to provide training on particular capabilities of the FinOps practice, celebrate successes, and reinforce goals and good practices.
Training via formal or informal channels, provided internally or via external parties such as the FinOps Foundation, Linux Foundation, Cloud Providers, or external learning organizations. Cloud Providers offer standard training at the Practitioner level which covers the basics of their services and operations for all audiences. Cloud providers, publishers and other vendors will often provide training for organizations on particular topics of interest to ensure better understanding and efficient use of their products.
Conferences and external events, such as FinOps Foundation events, cloud provider, or cloud industry events centered on efficient or effective use of cloud. Major cloud providers offer large annual events, and various regional ones, as does the FinOps Foundation and many of its members.
Initiatives aimed at improving the business value of cloud that give participants the opportunity to use the knowledge they have gained, such as internal challenges, speaking at internal or external events, or interactive team building activities. Involvement in related trade associations, such as the FinOps Foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Open Source Software Forum, ITAM Forum, Green Software Foundation, or similar organizations can provide opportunities to strengthen ties with related groups, and highlight the benefits of a strong FinOps practice. In addition, speaking engagements encourage deeper understanding of topics, and provide excellent career development opportunities to employees, and positive exposure for the organization
Formal definition of requirements, certifications, job skills, and role descriptions for personas involved with FinOps in the organization. Working with internal Training organizations, and human capital programs internally to include FinOps awareness in onboarding, and to ensure FinOps related knowledge is included in job descriptions where required can reduce introductory FinOps training needs in the long term and ensure candidates are well prepared when they arrive.
Internal repositories of common FinOps documentation, terminology, glossaries, and basic concepts. This accessible, internal virtual team space or library is where terminology can be clearly defined in each discipline, where common processes or practices can be spelled out, and where FinOps deliverables (e.g. Tagging Strategy, Cloud Policies, Optimization Playbooks) can be stored as an organization matures.

Training and enablement may target learning FinOps itself; specific technical, financial, or business topics; contextualized business functions; or a combination of these.

Maturity Assessment

Crawl

Enablement occurs within specific teams/functions themselves and is based on the specific needs of each team
Covers basic FinOps processes and principles, such as Metadata & Account Organization, Cost Allocation, Ownership & Accountability
Education is generally directed towards Usage Optimization and Rate Optimization as the main vehicles for improving business value
Team Leaders drive enablement by assigning responsibilities that challenge and develop FinOps capabilities
Training or enablement is sought out by those who recognize they need it
Some common terms are defined, but many terms are not well understood across disciplines or organizational silos

Walk

Education initiatives extend across teams to promote mutual understanding, purpose and collaboration
Covers a broader range of FinOps processes and practices, such as Forecasting, Managing shared costs, Budget Management
Education targets Quantifying Business Value domain activities to provide context to cloud cost management goals
Functional Leaders drive enablement by assigning responsibilities that cross functional boundaries and emphasize collaboration
Training and enablement is proactively provided to key persona stakeholders when they require it
FinOps team provides or defines recommendations for formal and informal training relevant to some personas from cloud providers, vendors, or external organizations
FinOps Champion programs to support the development of a FinOps culture throughout the organization
Education is tailored to the organization to present FinOps in the organization’s context (tooling, roles and responsibilities, uses cases based on personas…) to ensure autonomy of personas into their activities
A common repository of FinOps terminology and documentation is available to all personas

Run

Education & Enablement extends across the enterprise to promote alignment of cloud value initiatives with organizational goals
Covers the full range of FinOps processes and practices, including those intended to establish FinOps culture integration with other business disciplines in place at the organization
Executives drive enablement by assigning responsibilities that emphasize alignment with strategic goals
Training and enablement is required for all personas and specified in advance of when necessary
FinOps provides or recommends both formal and informal training relevant to all personas
FinOps provides or specifies access to cloud provider and vendor training, events, and opportunities
FinOps awareness, and appropriate cloud skills are incorporated in job requirements for FinOps personas and included in onboarding for new employees and contractors where appropriate
Internal FinOps events are lasting and mobilize internal stakeholders
Common repositories of FinOps deliverables, terminology, and processes is accessible and used by all personas

Functional Activities

FinOps Practitioner

As someone in the FinOps team role, I will…

Become trained and certified in FinOps, and all aspects of the FinOps practice
Become trained or certified in the fundamentals of the major cloud providers or cloud platforms used by my organization
Seek training in the various persona disciplines with whom the FinOps practice will collaborate
Identify the training and enablement needs of various personas and organizational groups related to FinOps and cloud adoption generally
Collaborate with my organization’s cloud engineering, finance, product, or procurement teams to identify appropriate cloud training or enablement opportunities
Identify champions within the various personas in my organization and collaborate with them on developing common requirements for enablement
Collaborate with cloud providers, vendors, and external groups to identify appropriate training opportunities
Collaborate with HR department to ensure job requirements, onboarding, and training paths are defined and aligned with the organization by persona
Participate in internal or external events in my organization to facilitate FinOps knowledge sharing
Establish a centralized knowledge based serving as a repository for FinOps documentation, training materials, and terminology to enable self-directed learning across FinOps Personas

Product

As someone in a Product role, I will…

Become trained and certified as a FinOps Practitioner or equivalent
Collaborate with the FinOps team to identify skills and knowledge required of other disciplines to effectively collaborate with me in my areas of expertise
Share experience, best practices and tips regarding my practice of FinOps
Participate in cross-discipline training, as recommended by the FinOps team and my management
Contribute to documentation and common terminology repositories for content about my area
Give visibility on business objectives to contextualized FinOps concepts (e.g. unit economics for my products)

Finance

As someone in a Finance role, I will…

Become trained and certified as a FinOps Practitioner or equivalent
Collaborate with the FinOps team to identify skills and knowledge required of other disciplines to effectively collaborate with me in my areas of expertise
Share experience, best practices and tips regarding my practice of FinOps
Participate in cross-discipline training, as recommended by the FinOps team and my management
Contribute to documentation and common terminology repositories for content about my area

Procurement

As someone in a Procurement role, I will…

Become trained and certified as a FinOps Practitioner or equivalent
Collaborate with the FinOps team to identify skills and knowledge required of other disciplines to effectively collaborate with me in my areas of expertise
Share experience, best practices and tips regarding my practice of FinOps
Participate in cross-discipline training, as recommended by the FinOps team and my management
Contribute to documentation and common terminology repositories for content about my area

Engineering

As someone in an Engineering role, I will…

Become trained and certified as a FinOps Engineer or equivalent
Collaborate with the FinOps team to identify skills and knowledge required of other disciplines to effectively collaborate with me in my areas of expertise
Share experience, best practices and tips regarding my practice of FinOps
Participate in cross-discipline training, as recommended by the FinOps team and my management
Contribute to documentation and common terminology repositories for content about my area
incorporate and prioritize FinOps initiatives into my daily activities

Leadership

As someone in a Leadership role, I will…

Promote FinOps training and enablement as a vector for achieving business value from cloud among those my areas of responsibility
Participate in formal and informal FinOps training activities to better understand and promote the culture of accountability throughout the organization
Become trained and Certified as a FinOps Practitioner or equivalent
Support and encourage including FinOps enablement in official job descriptions and training plans
Define and support the prioritization of FinOps initiatives as part of daily role activities across the organization
Speak often about FinOps’ importance and how it related to organizational objectives

Allied Personas

As someone in an Allied Persona role, I will…

Seek out learning opportunities to understand and become trained in FinOps
Collaborate with the FinOps team to identify skills and knowledge required of other disciplines to effectively collaborate with me in my areas of expertise
Share experience, best practices and tips regarding my discipline and its relationship to FinOps and other persona disciplines
Contribute to documentation and common terminology repositories for content about my area

Measures of Success & KPIs

Training materials are available to every discipline, at every level to include both generic, and company specific info
Training is proactively offered both with internal delivery as well as access to external content as applicable
Employees feel empowered and encouraged to learn about their discipline and other disciplines, and to help in coaching others
Ongoing opportunities to learn, both formal and informal, are offered consistently over time
Leadership drives empowerment by promoting skills development, on-the-job learning and encouraging the culture of accountability
Everyone in the organization understands why FinOps is important and how its practice in their persona discipline provides business value to the organization
Training opportunities encourage collaboration and cross-fertilization of ideas across different functions
Training is mindful of providing for different learning styles and needs for different individuals as well as different disciplines and levels of responsibility
Established centralized knowledge based serving as a repository for FinOps documentation, training materials, and terminology enabling self-directed learning

KPIs

Percentage of FinOps Personas who have completed training: (actual count certified / target for certification) * 100
Count of FinOps learning opportunities offered: (Target number of courses grouped by time period)
Participation in FinOps internal events: (Ratio = number of persons assisting/number of person invited * 100). Indicates involvement of stakeholders in acquiring knowledge and skills. It should increase at the beginning and then stabilize once the target population is mobilized.
Consultation ratio: (number of teams/stakeholders who consulted the Confluence/Wiki/Training material)
- It could be related to the Number of Monthly Active Users (MAU) for Cost Insight Products but targeting knowledge acquisition. These indicators should increase over time and stabilize and include a comparison from previous KPI interest in the topic based on stakeholders’ initiatives to consult documentation.

Inputs & Outputs

FinOps targeted training and enablement
HR data that tracks training needs, training participation and certifications achieved
Cross-team FinOps training courses and sharing of best practices
Brown-bag/Lunch-n-Learn for cross FinOps Persona training
Centralized knowledge based serving as a repository for FinOps documentation, training materials, and terminology
Defined communication strategy to evangelize FinOps and communicate impact, value, and successes throughout the organization
Regular opportunities to ask questions related to cost optimization, cost savings, cost management, and other FinOps capabilities
Centralized forum for any personas to submit questions and feedback to FinOps team

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