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Establishing a FinOps Decision & Accountability Structure

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Definition

Establishing a FinOps Decision & Accountability Structure is about capturing an organization’s FinOps-related roles, responsibilities and activities to bridge operational cloud cost management gaps between teams. These decision-making and accountability structures help cross-functional teams work out the processes and decision trees they’ll need to use to tackle challenges and resolve conflicts, in addition to having them be proactively available when they need to take action ahead of time.

Rather than having every Capability prescribe a RACI matrix (or one of the other responsibility-assignment-matrix variants), each Capability encapsulates an approachable persona-user-story format in the context of the FinOps activities need for the capability. Then we breakout responsibility-assignment into this capability.

It highlights the need for this capability in a FinOps practice, but also allows for the Framework to remain relevant for a 20 person start-up without the need for imposing process (like RACI). At the same time, this Capability is available for larger organizations, where a RACI matrix would be implemented.

Maturity Assessment

Crawl

Walk

Run

Functional Activity

Here’s a high-level look at how FinOps Personas sort their roles and responsibilities. This table uses the Responsibility Assignment Matrix (aka RACI model), organizing personas by how they might be Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, or Informed.

FinOps Team App Teams IT Domains Finance Sourcing Business
Establishing cloud cost control guardrails A I C C
Cloud cost tagging standards & compliance A R C R C
Cloud cost allocations keys A R C R
Synchronizing actual & planned cloud spend with official budgets & plans A I C R C
Helping Application teams identify work-load level cost efficiency targets A R I C
Workload-level cost efficiency realization C A I C
Optimize enterprise-level costs through right-sizing; resource decom; etc A R C I
Lead buying strategy to capture savings via reserved instances; VM spot pricing; etc. A C C R C
IT Planning, forecasting & budgeting C R A R C
Bottom-up planning & forecasting C R A R C
Business Unit Economics C R A R A

Source: Adopting FinOps, by the FinOps Foundation

Measure(s) of Success & KPI

Measures of success are represented in the context of cloud costs and may include one or more key performance indicators (KPIs), describe objectives with key results (OKRs), and declare thresholds defining outliers or acceptable variance from forecasted trends.

Inputs

Here are known information inputs that contribute to the measure(s) of success listed above: