The incremental benefit of FinOps Training for your critical Cloud stakeholders

FinOps Training is an advantageous investment in your teams managing Cloud, DevOps, and IT Finance. It teaches them a common language and creates a collaborative environment where teams are working with one another with common interests in mind to enhance business value from cloud spend.

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I’ve had many conversations over the last few months with clients regarding FinOps and the incremental value from its practices. Some of these conversations have been around getting FinOps training and/or FinOps Practitioner Certification. As an example, I happened to be on a call with an Enterprise client about getting their FinOps stakeholders proper FinOps training and Practitioner Certifications. They asked a great question – What incremental change will someone see in their role and abilities as a result of taking the FinOps Certification Course. As I often do, I try and use my prior experiences and knowledge to help frame an issue and solution. I related to them that previously we felt like we were in the wild west with Cloud but now we’re more on the frontier of cloud, and for Cloud practitioners to survive and flourish, we can prepare our organization to take this journey with some level of preparation. The FinOps course provides that type of incremental change in someone’s role. It sounded good to me, but I did want to give my client something more tangible which led me to writing this blog post.

The FinOps methodology focuses on helping its practitioners on creating a collaborative, enterprise-wide team that specializes in optimizing cloud spend and usage. This provides a better understanding of the cloud from a financial aspect, not just a technical one. Cloud oversight is often simply passed to Engineering. With the exponential growth of Cloud, and its impact on organizations’ overall budgets, it’s now recognized that Finance and other teams must be involved as well. A FinOps practitioner will have a deeper understanding on how to engage the various persona groups defined by FinOps including Engineers, Finance, and the TBMO to gather the necessary data to oversee cloud spend, usage and direct business value.

Additionally, FinOps guides clear, consistent, concise reporting. For many organizations, creating these types of reports is extremely time consuming, in addition to tweaking them over time to be most useful for specific personas. After taking the certification course FinOps Certified Practitioners should be able to focus on reports that are a call to action for each persona, highlighting action items or data that are focused on resolving and reaching your organizations cloud business goals.

To-date we only have anecdotal evidence of incremental improvements in FinOps organizations due to FinOps training. Clients have told us that by becoming FinOps Certified Practitioners it has changed the way peers are working together across teams for a common interest. This is a real paradigm shift in running and changing the business by having a cohesive team from different organizations work on common goals and challenges. Prior to this, these stakeholders didn’t always consider the strategic goals over tactical or even any of the business value realized outside of their immediate purview.

FinOps students are positioned to continuously evolve and continue to grow in their understanding of cloud, finance and technology terms and subjects. The collaborative team effort creates a common language that all stakeholders can understand. Not only in understanding what  occurs during the phases of FinOps (Inform/Optimize/Operate) but also the how  to create a common language related to both Engineering and Finance. This can prove immediate value as the FinOps practitioners work toward a common lexicon for others within the organization while creating transparency to create an environment of shared management of cloud spend and usage. While one would never expect a student to leave the class understanding everything, they will have taken a massive step forward in their understanding of critical cloud concepts.

Jason Ockun with assistance from Kate Lozer and Justin Kean.

Jason Ockun is a FinOps Certified Practitioner and Strategic Customer Success Advisor at Apptio. Kate Lozer is a FinOps Certified Practitioner and a Premier Customer Success Manager at Apptio. Justin Kean is a FinOps Certified Instructor and FinOps SME at Apptio.