By Noel Crowley, Director of Cloud FinOps, Fidelity
The goal with our “Try FinOps Tournament” was to raise the awareness of Fidelity’s FinOps practice across the firm in an effort to minimize cloud costs. The strategy was to use a game to not only educate technologists about FinOps, the KPIs in this space, and the relatively simple steps that can be implemented to reduce cloud costs; but also to receive feedback from technologists to understand what they wanted the FinOps practice to do next.
Over the course of 3 months, Fidelity’s Enterprise FinOps Practice team worked diligently to create a game to educate technologists across the firm on its FinOps practice. Each member of the team selected an area that was important for the enterprise to understand.
These areas were designated as “rooms” in the game. There were 11 rooms in total. Examples included “FinOps 101,” “FinOps KPIs,” and “Areas for Cost Reduction.” Next, team members identified and developed learning materials (Powerpoint slide decks, PDFs, web links, videos, and other internal documentation) to be used in each room to educate players. The rooms were designed to be as cloud agnostic as possible.
After reviewing the learning materials, players were presented with a “quiz” to assess their knowledge acquisition on each topic. On average, each room took about 1 hour to complete.
Approximately 1,400 technologists played the game, and over 50% played to completion. As a result, Fidelity saw an increase in technologists proactively attending Enterprise FinOps office hours to engage in conversations on ways to further reduce cloud costs and to improve Fidelity’s FinOps practice moving forward.