The team you place behind your FinOps operations can ensure your efforts align with your organization. Without an effective team, the awareness you gain from utilizing FinOps will not be put into action, and you could still be losing money or wasting resources. A FinOps team is made up of those within your business and external FinOps engineers, all of them with the same goal of optimizing your cloud usage and saving you money.
Here’s who you need to create a successful FinOps team in your organization.
The Goals of a FinOps Team
The team that you put together is there to uphold your FinOps initiatives. A team should be comprised of multiple departments and skill sets to ensure that any area needing attention is tended to. For example, your team should revolve around management, procurement, financing, IT, and business. With all of these areas met, your team can tackle dilemmas or strategies from all angles to get you on the path to success.
The Makeup of a FinOps Team
With the handful of tasks a FinOps team takes on, primary roles are implemented to ensure all jobs are covered properly.
Executives
Business and management are typically overseen by the executives within the FinOps team. This can be VPs, C-suite members, or anyone involved with high-level leadership or decision-making within the organization. They are there to help push for accountability, keep a close eye on spending, and advocate for transparency within the organization’s cloud budget.
The Finance Department
The organization’s CFO and other financial heads should be involved with the FinOps team. They will be the ones to oversee technology procurement, vendor negotiations, forecasting, chargeback, and assessing historical data in order to develop spending strategies for the upcoming months. These team members will be the face of conversations with cloud services to ensure the organization is spending accordingly.
Engineers and Operations
The next people that should be in your FinOps team are engineers and operations managers. This is anyone that will work closely with software development, IT operations, resource usage, and infrastructure. Engineers will track and monitor cost and performance metrics to ensure the highest efficiencies and that spending is not erratic.
FinOps Practitioners
Within your team should be those who are experienced and well-versed in FinOps and cloud spending. This could be a Director of Cloud Optimization, Cost Optimization Data Analyst, or FinOps Analyst. You could choose to train someone within your organization to take on this position or look externally to a third-party FinOps company. Those in these positions will focus more on forecasting, budget allocation, and any specific FinOps concerns that could arise.
To have effective FinOps implementation, you need an action-based team. To create your team or for any questions, contact us at FinOps Oversight.