FinOps Practice Operations

Framework / Domains / Manage the FinOps Practice / FinOps Practice Operations

Driving a culture of accountability by running an effective FinOps team that empowers the FinOps practice through continuous implementation of FinOps strategy and processes.

Build a FinOps team

Ensure the FinOps team is positioned well in the organization, organized appropriately, staffed correctly, and provided with necessary funding
Ensure that the working plan accounts for the growth of FinOps at the organization using the established maturity process
Define and evolving FinOps team skills

Manage the FinOps practice

Create an implementation plan for the organization’s FinOps strategy
Mature the practice over time
Manage FinOps work
Integrate data and processes with the organization

Collaborate and make decisions

Introduce FinOps to all portions of an organization based on the organization’s goals and needs
Foster stakeholder relationships
Manage decision-making models

Drive stakeholder adoption

Stage 1: Plan for FinOps
Stage 2: SocializeFinOps
Stage 3: Prepare the organization
Drive cultural adoption

Definition

FinOps Practice Operations encompasses the set of activities required to build and operate a FinOps practice within an organization.

This is a broad capability with a wide range of activities geared toward running an effective FinOps practice. These activities include the steps organizations take to adopt FinOps in the first place, the continuous adjustments to the FinOps Team and its scope of work as the FinOps practice matures, the ongoing work to build a cost aware culture throughout the organization, and the decision frameworks required to build collaboration between organizational silos.

Much of the work of this capability goes beyond the direct efforts to understand spending, quantify value, or optimize the organization’s cloud use. FinOps Practice Operations centers on the supporting activities that contribute to the implementation and growth of FinOps within the organization.

An important note on the term “FinOps team”

Every organization’s FinOps practice is unique, and so are FinOps teams. The FinOps team is the group of people who enable FinOps in an organization. These people might work in a single central team, in a fully virtual team (like a FinOps committee made of members from different core persona groups, often Finance and Engineering), in a hub and spoke model (with a central FinOps team with members distributed across the organization, often embedded into Engineering teams), or other designs, depending on the needs and structure of the organization. Some FinOps teams are called FinOps teams, some have different names (e.g. Cloud Business Office) or some organizations may run their FinOps practice from within a Cloud Center of Excellence or other team. FinOps team is intended throughout the FinOps Framework as an inclusive term referring to the group of people enabling, performing, and supporting the FinOps practice, regardless of how they are organized or named.

Additionally, FinOps teams are led by FinOps leaders, sometimes called FinOps Drivers. Although the practice of FinOps requires collaboration and a culture of accountability, without strong leadership to encourage, enable, and provide guidance, the broad ranging changes that the adoption of cloud demands can be hard to achieve.

Building a FinOps team is an incremental process for most organizations. The roles and skills required to foster a FinOps culture will evolve over time, but will typically require a mix of leadership, communication, analytical, and technical skills to support the work described in the other FinOps Domains. Demands placed on the FinOps team will depend largely on two factors: the complexity of the organization, and the complexity of their cloud use. So team size tends to go up over time as organizations become more mature in their cloud use, and as more teams internally engage in cloud use and FinOps practice. FinOps teams tend to report to the executive who is responsible for making adoption of cloud successful. In organizations where the focus is on digital transformation, the CTO or CIO tends to be in charge of FinOps as well as cloud adoption. In organizations more focused on financial controls, CFOs may lead FinOps. Wherever the FinOps team reports, a strong relationship with all of the Persona leaders in the organization is paramount to keep collaboration high and silos to a minimum.

Managing a FinOps practice over time involves developing and maturing the FinOps practice strategy, adapting both the team and its scope of work to the Capabilities which are most important to achieve value from cloud use, and adjusting the staffing, size, skills, tools, and focus of the FinOps team.

FinOps Practice Operations will define ways in which different personas in the organization will collaborate and make decisions. FinOps requires collaboration to make timely, data-driven decisions to drive cloud value. Understanding decision-making and accountability structures help cross-functional teams work out the processes and decision trees they’ll need to tackle challenges and resolve conflicts.

The FinOps team drives clear lines of responsibility among all personas for cloud-related activities, enabling issues to be addressed and resolved, with transparency, and at the speed required to avoid waste and preserve value.

Finally, Adopting FinOps for the first time in an organization is performed in a series of stages from initial planning, to socializing FinOps concepts across persona groups, to preparing the organization for launch, and finally to operationalizing the FinOps cultural practices. This seems like a linear process, but it will be repeated, with some abbreviated steps, as new parts of the organization are brought into the practice, as reorganization changes responsibilities, as acquisitions are made, as new leaders or teams are introduced, or even as new models of cloud use are introduced.

Try to use existing decision making and governance mechanisms. Ensure the FinOps Decision and Accountability structure is clear and documented, including who has decision making authority versus who has an advisory role. Work out how your team structure connects to the broader governance arrangements of your agency to ensure clear reporting lines and accountability for tasks and deliverables.

This capability obviously relates closely to the other Capabilities within the Manage the FinOps Practice domain. The Adopting FinOps working group has developed more detailed information on the stages of FinOps adoption.

Maturity Assessment

Crawl

As cloud adoption grows, the organization uses initial assessments, to create an executive Finops scope summary that will be provided to executives across the organization, and which provides clear details for each executive persona
Cloud adoption or use is low, and/or the complexity of cloud use is low so general FinOps goals and KPIs can be used to measure progress
A list of resources is in place that will be necessary for the FinOps team and Include any budget needs for recommended resources
FinOps team lead(s) are identified as cloud use grows. FinOps leads should ideally have a combination of deep experience as a FinOps practitioner, Certified FinOps Professional certification, experience and influence within the organization, and complex project management experience. If no candidates within the organization are available, the FinOps Job Board may help find appropriate candidates
An initial staffing plan, list of resources, and proposed budget is in place for the FinOps team
A variety of virtual FinOps team support is in place rather than hiring onto the FinOps team with full-time resources. For instance, cloud engineers who can answer questions, finance support, reporting teams, training staff, etc.
An initial scope of work for the team, objectives, and timelines is created for first activities. If this is an adoption for a new part of the organization, they will benefit from meeting with or learning from other teams who are further along
There are few critical activities which require cross-discipline or urgent decision making are understood, and processes to manage these situations are immature

Walk

Cloud use is more complex and more established, requiring a FinOps team that is well established in the organization, and its role is well understood across the majority of persona teams
FinOps teams work across personas at multiple levels of the organizational staff, communicating effectively, offering a variety of ways to interact with the FinOps team.
The cloud strategy is well articulated and the FinOps strategy has been clearly spelled out, identifying specific goals and using agreed upon KPIs
The FinOps team regularly reviews its needs, size, roles, and placement and makes adjustments as needed
A majority of the organization has adopted FinOps as an operating model and are developing its cultural practices
Regular, infrequent, cross-functional planning sessions to set goals, define tasks, allocate resources, and establish timelines for the FinOps practice
Internal objectives and key results, intake processes, request triage, task tracking and regular status updates are provided by the FinOps team
A variety of activities require timely or cross-discipline decision making are understood and well documented, and need to be exercised regularly, requiring a more formal decision model

Run

The organization’s cloud use, and/or the organization itself is very complex and mature with a wide variety of services and architectures, requiring a larger FinOps team is well established in the organization, and its role is well understood across all personas and organizational hierarchies
FinOps teams work across personas at the highest and lowest levels of the organizational staff, communicating effectively, offering a variety of ways to interact with the FinOps team and employing FinOps champions and others to extend the reach of the FinOps team
The cloud strategy is well articulated and the FinOps strategy has been clearly spelled out, identifying specific goals and using agreed upon KPIs that may differ across the wide variety of cloud use cases
The FinOps team regularly reviews its needs, size, roles, and placement and makes adjustments continuously, and works in established ways with virtual extensions of itself for specific edge cases
The FinOps team has a regular funding source, and the need for the team is well supported
The entire organization has adopted FinOps as an operating model and cultural practices
Regular, frequent, cross-functional planning sessions to set goals, define tasks, allocate resources, and establish timelines for the FinOps practice
FinOps processes are incorporated into the activities and using channels appropriate to most teams in the organization
A comprehensive, well documented Decision model is required to manage very large or complex organizations making a large number of decisions that require multiple disciplines or very frequent access.

Functional Activities

FinOps Practitioner

As someone in the FinOps team role, I will…

Research and confirm cloud goals, current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and blockers that are currently affecting my organization in terms of cloud usage, cost, and value
Provide clear and concise staffing needs to the appropriate executive teams. This will include requested FTE and virtual staff, recommended hierarchical position within the organization, overall FinOps budget needs, and goals that will be targeted as the FinOps team operates
Support the adoption of FinOps in the organization by reaching out to both executive and non-executive stakeholders. Additional work will go into engaging with staff from affected teams such as cloud engineering or finance to have them become more participatory and work towards long term engagement and cultural change. Consistent updates will be provided to all staff as the FinOps team progresses to make them part of the process as well.
Provide a FinOps team repository that will include reports, information related to FinOps, and a way for staff to utilize this information as needed.

Finance

As someone in the Finance role, I will…

Work to understand the goals of the FinOps team, and my interactions with it
Support the FinOps team and its members by providing insights into my needs, the tools I use, the information I require, and finance activities
Participate in identifying and providing input to decision models that may require my expertise (e.g. prepaying for reservations, managing budget overages)

Product

As someone in a Product role, I will…

Work to understand the goals of the FinOps team, and my interactions with it
Support the FinOps team and its members by providing insights into my needs, the tools I use, the information I require
Participate in identifying and providing input to decision models that may require my expertise (e.g. managing budget overages)

Procurement

As someone in a Procurement role, I will…

Work to understand the goals of the FinOps team, and my interactions with it
Support the FinOps team and its members by providing insights into my needs, the tools I use, the information I require
Participate in identifying and providing input to decision models that may require my expertise (e.g. prepaying for reservations)

Engineering

As someone in an Engineering role, I will…

Work to understand the goals of the FinOps team, and my interactions with it
Support the FinOps team and its members by providing insights into my needs, the tools I use, the information I require, and engineering activities
Participate in identifying and providing input to decision models that may require Engineering expertise (e.g. managing anomalies)

Leadership

As someone in a Leadership role, I will…

Provide input into the goals of the FinOps team, and my interactions with it
Support the actions of the FinOps team across the organization
Regularly review the effectiveness of the FinOps team, and determine where changes are required in its staffing, scope, size, or organizational structure
Support the FinOps team and its members by providing insights into my needs, the tools I use, the information I require
Participate in identifying and providing input to decision models that may require my expertise (e.g. prepaying for reservations, managing budget overages)
Provide funding and resources to the FinOps team

Allied Personas

As someone in an Allied Persona role, I will…

Work to understand the goals of the FinOps team, and my interactions with it
Support the FinOps team and its members by providing insights into my needs, the tools I use, the information I require
Participate in identifying and providing input to decision models that may require my expertise (e.g. managing budget overages)

Measures of Success & KPIs

KPI measuring the savings / cost avoidance generated by the FinOps team are in place to demonstrate the value of FinOps and the effectiveness of the FinOps team
Organizational awareness of the FinOps team, and adoption of FinOps practices and culture
FinOps team has ready access to all levels of the organization and all disciplines within the organization to promote FinOps as an operating model and cultural practice
Use of reporting and dashboards provided by the FinOps teams is widespread. As new, more developed, dashboards or reports are created to track how they are utilized by staff. Use this to confirm staff are engaged with the process and if not look for feedback as to why.
When cross-functional or urgent business decisions need to be made, the FinOps team has identified a decision model for taking action
Active sharing of FinOps information within teams or from managers to staff. Confirm with managers that they feel confident using the data provided to share cost and usage information with their staff.

Inputs and Outputs

FinOps Tools & Services – coordinate on staffing and support needs, tools and resources to make the FinOps team more effective
FinOps Education & Enablement – coordinate to deliver needed training to all parts of the organization and to the FinOps team itself, to continually develop skills of the FInOps team staff
Executives and Leadership to support the activities of the FinOps team through executive sponsorship
HR and Organizational Design groups for FinOps role description development, hiring, skill development, support

View former Establishing a FinOps Decision & Accountability Structure page

View former Establishing FinOps Culture page

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