As you begin your FinOps journey setting the size of your team can be difficult.  It's not just a matter of having the right people, but also if you have the right number of people.  There isn't a simple math formula that dictates the size of your teams.  So how large of a team do you start with and how do you know if you need to add more team members?

Remember that FinOps has a Crawl/Walk/Run approach, you'll be doing this as a marathon, not a sprint.  This means that to start you have "low hanging fruit" such as turning off idle instances.  It's also not uncommon for a savings-focused team of one to see cost-savings of up to 30% in their first year just by moving to a higher rate of discounted coverage.  These are fantastic first steps!  However, once the new discount coverage rate is met you won't see that same burst of savings again.  Instead, the team transitions into maintaining that discount coverage rate and the harder-to-measure task of reviewing spending and usage to avoid waste. 

So how will you know if more savings are available if you add to your team?  Let's start by asking a few questions:

• Should I write a business use case that I can give out to show why a new person is needed?  Yes, yes you should.  
• Should you add a virtual or full-time team member? Remember that adding a team member doesn't have to mean adding a full headcount, instead, you could choose to add a virtual team member.  For example, an engineer who spends 5 hours a month with the team to provide technical expertise on GCP usage. 
• Are you on one public cloud? Two? Three? If your company is using three cloud vendors you may consider extra team members, having specialists in the different clouds.  This expert technical support may identify savings or opportunities that were missed previously.
• How complex is our business? Remember to consider your own company's structure.  How many departments do you have?  Are you international?  Are there multiple divisions?  With the size of your current FinOps team can you fully monitor the entire business?  Can you provide, in a timely fashion, any reporting and information that may be requested?

By taking the time to consider the questions above, and reviewing your own goals and metrics for cloud spend, you will be well on your way to making the right decision for your company.