Cloud FinOps

Chapter 3. Cultural Shift and the FinOps Team

FinOps is more than a technology solution or a checklist handed off to a team. It’s a living, breathing way of approaching the cloud and cloud financial management. Technology certainly helps solve problems like checking reservation coverage and detecting anomalous spending, but it can’t have a conversation about the business value of those actions.

In this chapter, we’ll look at who drives FinOps and where they sit in the organization. We’ll examine FinOps personas and roles, because ultimately it’s people who make FinOps work.

Company culture around spend must evolve alongside tooling and processes in an organization. There are plenty of obstacles and challenges in implementing a successful FinOps practice. They’ll either be caused or solved by the people and teams across the organization. Ultimately, it comes down to you. Will your teams have the right values and traits for successful FinOps?

Who Does FinOps?

From finance to operations to developers to architects to executives, everyone in an organization has a part to play. Take a look at the wide variety of job titles quoted throughout this book, and you’ll see what we mean.

Everyone’s job is to help the company go faster. In an agile world, we are all servant leaders to help the engineers deliver what they are doing. Everyone else should be there to unblock delivery.

David Andrews, Senior Technology Manager, Just Eat

Whether it’s a small business with only a few staff members ...