Managing cloud infrastructure can be daunting. With cloud services and technologies rapidly updating, it’s far too easy to accidentally max out on cloud spending if you’re not careful. Adopting FinOps strategies can help your organization reduce costs and maximize the business value of cloud usage.
Doing so, however, requires breaking down silos and bringing together diverse teams to collaborate with a unified FinOps mindset. So, how can you start and lead this type of FinOps movement in your organization? By establishing a FinOps culture!
Read on as we discuss the key steps and practices to establish a strong FinOps culture and ensure cost-effective cloud spending organization-wide.
What Is a FinOps Culture?
A FinOps culture is an organizational mindset that engages all stakeholders to take responsibility for and participate in cloud cost management practices to maximize the business value of cloud investments. This culture emphasizes shared responsibility, transparency, and continuous optimization, fostering a mindset where every team is accountable for their cloud usage and spending.
In a FinOps culture, decisions around cloud resources are data-driven, aiming to balance cost control with performance needs.
FinOps is much more than a task to check off the to-do list; it’s a cultural movement where finance, IT, and DevOps teams join forces to transform the organization’s approach to cloud spending.
This culture embraces working for the long term, prioritizing a continuous improvement mentality to refine processes as goals change across FinOps Domains and teams progress through stages of FinOps Maturity.
Key Steps and Practices To Establish a FinOps Culture
FinOps culture is about more than onboarding the right tools. Your organization must help diverse team members get involved by encouraging education, collaboration, accountability, competition, and other cross-team philosophies.
Here’s a look at 10 best practices to establish a sustainable FinOps culture:
1. Secure executive buy-in and leadership support
Securing executive support is key to establishing a FinOps culture. When leaders are committed to FinOps, it shows the whole organization that managing cloud costs is a priority.
This backing provides the resources needed, like training and tools, and encourages all teams to get involved in cost management. Leadership support also helps set clear goals and aligns everyone on cost-saving efforts, making it easier to create a culture focused on cloud financial responsibility.
To secure executive buy-in and get leaders on board, start by thinking from their point of view. What are their overarching business goals? What are the executive priorities for your company? Then, show them how a FinOps culture can help them achieve these goals.
Outline the benefits of implementing a FinOps strategy, such as new cost savings, improved budgeting accuracy, and better forecasting. To help prove your point, you can provide FinOps success stories from other organizations or deploy a small-scale FinOps approach in-house as a pilot program.
Don’t forget to show the other side of the coin, too: Give executives an overview of the risks of not adopting FinOps practices, like poor cloud visibility and overspending.
2. Set clear goals and objectives
Before going all in on FinOps best practices, you need a clear understanding of what you want to achieve with your new initiative.
To set FinOps goals and objectives, work backward. Start by evaluating your organization’s current strategy for cloud management. Where are your weak points? What’s missing? What needs improvement?
You can get further insight to develop your list of FinOps priorities by engaging key stakeholders. Remember that a good FinOps strategy involves players from finance, IT, and business teams. Interview each of these teams to understand their cloud management pain points and what improvements they want to work towards.
Examples of clear goals include:
- Reducing overall cloud costs by 20% within a year.
- Increasing the percentage of reserved instances from 50% to 70%.
- Achieving 90% utilization of allocated cloud resources.
- Reducing idle resources by 15% each quarter.
With defined targets like these, teams can align on priorities, track progress, and continually improve cloud financial practices.
Finally, don’t forget to take a step back and make sure your list of FinOps objectives aligns with your organization’s overarching business goals.
3. Establish measures of success and KPIs
Collaboration, celebration, and competition are important pillars of a healthy FinOps culture. But don’t neglect the numbers.
As you foster a supportive community, remember to establish the clear KPIs and success metrics you’ll use to track and measure FinOps progress. These figures give your team a unified sense of direction, ensuring everyone works toward a common goal and understands what success means for your organization. These metrics help determine whether cloud financial management efforts are on track and where improvements are needed.
Valuable KPIs to measure FinOps success include:
- Cloud cost savings
- Budget vs. actual spend
- Resource utilization rate
- Effective Savings Rate
- Forecast accuracy
- Idle resource costs
- Cost per team
In addition to defining KPIs, leverage benchmarking to assess progress. Industrial benchmarking allows teams to compare their performance against industry standards, helping identify areas for improvement and ensuring competitiveness.
Inter-departmental benchmarking encourages departments to learn from each other’s successes, fostering continuous improvement. Regular tracking and assessment of these KPIs and benchmarks provide a unified direction for achieving your FinOps goals.
Next, set up systems to report and track progress toward goals. Ideally, you’ll have at least a monthly check-in meeting where all FinOps stakeholders convene to share and discuss their latest activities.
Beyond reporting, make sure you regularly evaluate your KPIs to see if they still accurately represent your success. If needed, make adjustments to ensure you continue working towards your organization’s overarching business goals.
4. Provide training and continuing education
FinOps is a fast-moving world that’s constantly shifting. Cloud providers frequently introduce new services, pricing models, and updates to cloud services and technologies. As such, organizations must prioritize ongoing training to ensure everyone is well-versed in cloud FinOps principles so they can leverage the latest cost-saving opportunities.
To create a training program for your diverse team members, start by understanding their current knowledge base. Conduct interviews and distribute surveys to gather information about teams’ skill levels in cloud usage, financial management, and general FinOps principles.
Then, set learning milestones. Clearly define and communicate what principles and strategies you want teams to spend time learning – and by when. The FinOps Foundation offers many certifications, with different options for engineering, finance, business, and technology professionals.
5. Promote transparency and data-driven decision-making
Teams can make the best, most informed cloud-spending decisions when they’re part of an organization that promotes transparent collaboration and data-sharing. So create a culture of transparency and open communication by encouraging teams to regularly come together and share information.
Start by establishing a reporting routine. Schedule regular meetings where finance, IT, and business teams convene to share updates, key metrics, and their latest progress on working towards FinOps goals. By making data-sharing a habit, you encourage and remind teams to look at the numbers and make decisions based on tangible data.
6. Encourage cross-team collaboration
A strong FinOps culture is only possible when members of finance, IT, and business teams work together in harmony. Each team brings unique insights and expertise: Finance understands budget constraints, engineering knows system requirements, and product teams have insights into user needs. Without collaboration, cost-saving initiatives often lack the holistic view necessary to be both effective and sustainable, leading to inefficiencies and missed optimization opportunities.
If you want to encourage a culture of cross-team collaboration, you need to make space for it — both online and in person. Create dedicated areas for teams to discuss FinOps topics, such as a specific channel in Slack or Microsoft Teams. Make sure a recurring meeting is on the books, whether that’s weekly or monthly, for all teams to come together and share updates and information on FinOps practices.
To streamline collaboration, it’s a good idea to designate a specific member(s) from each team who will be the go-to FinOps person. They should represent their specific team in larger meetings and advocate for FinOps principles.
Informal catch-ups are also invaluable for building a strong FinOps culture, as they help teams form real bonds and develop empathy for each other’s pressures. Casual coffee chats or short, unstructured syncs provide space for finance, engineering, and operations teams to openly share challenges without the formality of official meetings.
These interactions encourage trust and understanding, allowing teams to see beyond their specific roles. When each team understands the demands and limitations the others face, they’re more likely to support each other, collaborate effectively, and pursue shared cost management goals.
7. Empower teams with financial accountability
Open communication and collaboration are truly the foundations of a strong FinOps culture and overall FinOps success. But individual accountability has its place too.
Empowering teams with financial accountability means giving each team the authority to manage their own cloud costs while holding them responsible for staying within budget. This approach shifts cost management from being a top-down directive to shared responsibility, encouraging teams to make thoughtful decisions about their cloud usage.
Just as it’s important to define clear goals and objectives, organizations must spell out which teams own what when it comes to cloud cost management activities.
As you assign ownership of different FinOps practices, make sure you also clearly communicate expectations for each role. Confirm which FinOps team or team member will be responsible for sharing updates in meetings and establish a regular cadence for reporting.
Metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) go hand in hand with accountability. For each FinOps task, determine how you’ll measure success and progress. Set up recurring times to review these metrics so teams know when they’re responsible for delivering results.
To encourage people to get more involved in FinOps, accountability must be baked into FinOps culture so cost management is part of everyone’s regular workflows. Organizations can further drive this by fostering healthy competition, where teams are motivated to achieve cost-efficiency goals, sparking a positive, results-driven approach to cloud cost management.
8. Celebrate wins and iterate
A key component of a robust FinOps culture is leadership support and participation. However, leadership participation shouldn’t end with setting goals, assigning accountability, and monitoring progress, leaders must also make it a priority to celebrate teams’ wins.
By regularly highlighting even small FinOps wins, leaders reinforce positive behavior, encouraging teams to continually practice FinOps principles. Plus, celebrations motivate teams and inspire them to continue participating in a FinOps culture.
In order to create a culture of reward and recognition, you first need to determine success metrics so team members understand what goals they’re working towards.
Next, set clear checkpoints for evaluating teams’ FinOps activity. And when it’s time to recognize success, don’t hold back! Celebrate your fellow colleagues in company newsletters, meetings, and team lunches — or reward them with bonuses.
To further facilitate participation and engagement, you can also implement a peer recognition program, where team members can nominate their peers for their FinOps achievements.
9. Motivate with healthy competition
While your organization should take care to uplift teams by recognizing their successes, you should also tap into that group mentality to motivate teams with a little healthy competition.
To set the stage for healthy competition within your organization, communicate your defined metrics and KPIs to all team members, so everyone knows what they need to do to succeed.
Then, organize different contests around each specific goal, like “reduce cloud spend by X percent.” Finally, set deadlines and schedule meetings when everyone will come together to share their results — and find out who the winners are.
You can further gamify your FinOps competitions by creating a point system and handing out rewards, like free lunches or gift cards.
10. Adopt automation for efficiency
FinOps culture shouldn’t neglect automation. By leveraging FinOps automation tools, you can enhance efficiency and streamline FinOps practices. But to successfully bring automation into your FinOps workflows, it’s important to find the right tools.
There are different types of FinOps automation tools. Some provide real-time visibility into cloud costs through cloud billing data and infrastructure monitoring tools. Others automate usage optimization and cost avoidance, and some focus on cloud rate optimization.
In short, no single tool might serve all the use cases your organization needs. Instead, companies should focus on finding the best fit for each need based on a clear, data-driven understanding of the tool’s cost and value to their organization. Ongoing, periodic reassessments are also useful to ensure the tools continue to match changing needs.
As you onboard and implement new automation tools, don’t forget to schedule proper training. To get the most out of tools, team members should fully understand and be comfortable using the tools’ different capabilities and features.
Achieve FinOps Excellence With ProsperOps
FinOps culture is much more than tools or policies. It’s a living, evolving movement that encompasses the collaboration and efforts of diverse teams.
But to nurture and lead a strong FinOps movement, it helps to rally teams together behind a common resource that helps them optimize FinOps activities.
ProsperOps, the leading automated FinOps platform, automates the complex and time-consuming task of managing cloud discounts to reduce costs and minimize commitment risk for you. It runs silently in the background to simplify cloud cost management and place you in the 98th percentile of FinOps teams.
ProsperOps enables hands-free cloud cost optimization that’s easy to implement and helps you achieve significant savings. With ProsperOps, you get completely automated cost optimization 24/7 — with zero technical trade-offs, friction across your cloud ecosystem, or ongoing effort for your FinOps teams.
Learn how ProsperOps can strengthen your organization’s FinOps strategies — sign up for a free demo today.
