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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 Executive Persona

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.

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FinOps Certified Practitioner Training
FinOps engineer Persona

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.

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FinOps Certified Engineer Training
FinOps finance Persona

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.

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FinOps Executive Persona

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.

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FinOps Product Owner Persona

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.

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FinOps finance Persona

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.

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FinOps finance Persona

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.

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FinOps Sustainability Persona

Sustainability Practitioner within IT

The Sustainability Practitioner within Enterprise IT works to integrate green initiatives and principles within the organization's IT operations. They drive strategies for energy-efficient and resource usage efficient practices, reduce emissions from IT infrastructure, and foster a culture of sustainable decision-making across procurement and operations. Balancing the demand for IT services and environmental goals, they leverage their expertise to reduce costs, manage risk, and introduce predictability in resource usage.

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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

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

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

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

Sustainability Practitioner within IT

Primary Goal: To integrate sustainability principles into enterprise IT operations, reducing environmental impact, and driving cost and carbon efficiencies.

Objectives

  • Implement Sustainability-focused IT strategies across the organization
  • Work closely with IT and other stakeholders to reduce emissions associated with IT infrastructure (Engineering, Product Management and third party SaaS vendors etc.)
  • Promote energy-efficient and resource efficient practices within the IT department
  • To understand, evaluate, and optimize asset utilization from cradle to grave
  • Collaborate with the wider ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) team in the organization for reporting and setting targets (and other relevant teams as required)
  • Integrate sustainability considerations into procurement decisions

Challenges

  • Balancing the demand for IT services with the goal of reducing environmental impact
  • Overspend and/or over-utilization due to a lack of visibility
  • Navigating the complexity and inconsistency of measuring and reporting on IT-related emissions
  • Overcoming resistance to change within the organization
  • Understanding relevant regulations applicable for the reporting framework and complexities of measuring the carbon
  • Keeping up to date with rapidly evolving technology and sustainability best practices

Key Metrics

  • IT-related Carbon Footprint: Total emissions associated with IT operations
  • IT asset utilization and efficiency of asset consumption
  • Energy Efficiency: Energy consumption per unit of IT service delivered
  • E-Waste Reduction: Amount of IT-related waste diverted from landfill
  • Sustainable Procurement: Percentage of IT procurement spending with vendors that meet sustainability criteria

FinOps Benefits

  • Carbon Efficiency: By integrating FinOps with sustainability operations, significant carbon efficiencies can often be realized
  • Risk Management: Sustainability initiatives can reduce exposure to risks associated with environmental regulations and reputational damage
  • Predictability: FinOps practises involve forecasting, monitoring, and optimizing resource usage whilst also driving carbon efficiencies that aligns with Sustainability goals
  • Strategic Alignment: FinOps practitioners and Sustainability teams collaborate in achieving shared goals aimed at maximizing cloud efficiency, business value and sustainability goals

FinOps Team Structures

image The above diagram demonstrates how, for organizations operating on the FinOps model, a cross-functional team known as a Cloud Cost Center of Excellence (CCoE) interacts with the rest of the business to manage the cloud strategy, governance, and best practices that the rest of the organization can leverage to transform the business using the cloud.