FinOps education and enablement
This article helps you understand the FinOps education and enablement capability within the FinOps Framework and how to implement that in the Microsoft Cloud.
Definition
FinOps education and enablement involves refers to the process of providing training, resources, and support to help individuals and teams within an organization adopt FinOps practices.
Identify and share available training content with stakeholders. Create a central repository for training resources and provide introductory material that aligns with your FinOps processes.
Consider marketing initiatives to drive awareness, encourage discussion and sharing lessons learned, or get people actively participating and learning (for example, hackathon or innovation sprint). Focus on the value FinOps brings and share data from your early successes.
Provide a direct channel to get help and support as people are learning. Be responsive and establish a feedback loop to learn from help and support initiatives.
By formalizing FinOps education and enablement, stakeholders develop the knowledge and skills needed to effectively manage and optimize cloud usage and costs. Organizations see:
- Accelerated adoption of FinOps practices, leading to improved financial performance
- Increased agility
- Better alignment between cloud spending and business goals
Getting started
Implementing a plan for FinOps education and enablement is like most other training and development efforts. Consider the following points:
- If you're new to training and development, research common approaches and best practices.
- Research and build targeted content and marketing strategies around common pain points experienced by your organization.
- Consider focusing on a few key areas of interest to make more progress.
- Experiment with different lightweight approaches to see what works best within your organization.
- Target the core areas that are critical for FinOps, like:
- Cross-functional collaboration between finance, engineering, and business teams.
- Cloud-specific knowledge and terminology.
- Continuous improvement best practices around monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing cloud usage and costs.
- Consider activities like formal training programs, on-the-job training, mentoring, coaching, and self-directed learning.
- Explore targeted learning tools that could help accelerate efforts.
- Use available collaboration tools like Teams, Viva Engage, and SharePoint.
- Find multiple avenues to promote the program (for example, hackathons, lunch and learns).
- Track and measure success to demonstrate the value of your training and development efforts.
- Consider specific training for nontechnical roles, such as finance and business teams or senior leadership.
Building on the basics
At this point, you have a central repository for training content and targeted initiatives to drive awareness and encourage collaboration. As you move beyond the basics, consider the following points:
- Expand coverage to more or all capabilities and document processes and key contacts.
- Track telemetry and establish a feedback loop to learn from learning resources and help and support workflows.
- Review findings regularly and factor into future plans.
- Consider establishing an official internal support channel to provide help and support.
- Seek out and engage with stakeholders within your organization, including senior level sponsorship and cultivated supporters to build momentum.
- Identify people with passion for cost optimization and data-driven decision making to be part of the FinOps steering committee.