As organizations have moved their infrastructure to the cloud and coupled that move with a self-service cloud paradigm, it is easy to understand that “out of sight, out of mind” contributes to massive fiscal inefficiencies. FinOps is a play on DevOps where there is shared ownership [and action] to maximize cloud value. 

The sexy part of FinOps is its savings. Two of its most alluring elements are high ROI and immediacy of impact. I highly recommend organizations start their FinOps journey by demonstrating immediate savings. The reason I mention this is that I’ve seen a lot of FinOps journies struggle with organization engagement as key stakeholders evaluate and customize maturity models, evaluate tools and then plan processes around some future action. 

In fairness, there are a lot of FinOps articles, books, and frameworks that devote the bulk of their initial discussion to definitions, models, and processes. Then, only at the end, there is some general call to action with some more specific strategies. As such, it’s not surprising when readers model their journey’s chronology similar to the book’s/framework’s chapter structure….and take quite a bit of time to realize savings. 

I’ve found the most effective way to build engagement [for FinOps or really anything] is to rapidly showcase high value and ROI. A series of quick wins can provide critical momentum to fuel a mandate and investment. The focus of this FinOps guide is a chronological strategy to implement FinOps in your organization.  

Although the elements of this article ring true for all FinOps journeys, the perspective of this discussion is for organizations that have more than 10 million in annual cloud costs.