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A month-by-month roadmap for the three phases of FinOps
How do you go about establishing a measurable and achievable plan to bring FinOps into your organization? Use this sample roadmap to build your plan.
FinOps is a critical part of a successful cloud management strategy. Rising cloud spend, AI expenses and competitive urgency mean you need FinOps to achieve financial discipline and improve cloud ROI.
The overarching concept behind FinOps is accountability. Specific concepts include:
- Each team within the organization takes ownership of its cloud usage.
- Business value drives all decision-making.
- Transparency and collaboration are critical.
Many IT leaders are already familiar with FinOps and they face two key questions:
- How do I start the FinOps adoption process?
- How long will FinOps adoption take?
The following sample roadmap offers a month-by-month schedule of the phases for your FinOps initiative.
How to launch a successful FinOps initiative
Establishing a successful FinOps environment begins with completing three foundational steps.
Step 1. Establish a FinOps team to participate in the FinOps project
- Establish a cross-functional FinOps team consisting of stakeholders.
- Define team member roles, including FinOps practitioner, cloud accounting specialist, engineering leads, product owners and more.
- Define a Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed (RACI) project management structure.
Step 2. Develop evaluation criteria for FinOps tooling
Investigate and integrate a technology and tooling structure, including:
- Cloud-native solutions.
- Cloud service provider tools.
- Third-party platforms.
- Automation systems and best practices.
Step 3. Define resource management standards
- Establish the role of metadata and tagging in accountability.
- Outline showback and chargeback requirements.
- Construct a minimum tagging schema that you can scale later.
- Establish a formula for measuring the ROI for your FinOps deployment.
- Investigate automation and enforcement mechanisms for tagging.
The FinOps roadmap timeline
Adapt the following example roadmap to your organization's requirements. The timeline may vary depending on the deployment size, available resources and existing components.
Phase 1: Inform (months 1-3)
The objective of this stage is to establish project visibility and create a foundational understanding. It is also necessary to develop a baseline from which to measure, enabling the organization to track growth and progress.
Month 1
- Create a cross-functional FinOps team with defined roles.
- Educate stakeholders per the RACI structure established above.
- Implement cost monitoring, alerting and reporting tools.
Month 2
- Define tagging standards.
- Begin showback reporting.
- Define ownership for cloud costs.
- Establish baseline metrics from which to measure progress.
Month 3
- Review cost allocation.
- Identify cloud waste practices to address.
Phase 2: Optimize (months 4-9)
The objective of Stage 2 is to optimize, drive continuous improvement and establish governance frameworks. These tasks include improving tool use and resource management.
Month 4. Optimization sprints focused on rightsizing opportunities and identifying orphaned resources.
Month 5. Execute rightsizing and other optimization opportunities.
Month 6. Define baseline unit costs (cost per service/transaction) and balance cost-performance trade-offs.
Month 7. Identify opportunities for automation, scaling and AI integration.
Month 8. Develop predictive analytics and forecasting capabilities.
Month 9. Create best practices, guidelines and documentation.
Phase 3: Maturity and operations (months 9+)
This stage is the realization of the FinOps deployment. The deployment should be functional, enabling data-driven decision-making and reporting that accurately reflects how each business unit utilizes cloud resources. This stage is less defined because it involves continuous improvement throughout the lifecycle of your entire cloud deployment.
This stage consists of the following key priorities, in no particular order:
- Establish a functional and mature FinOps culture across the organization's entire cloud deployment.
- Implement AI-assisted management for continued optimization.
- Develop data-driven, forward-looking cloud investment plans grounded in accurate forecasting.
- Establish continuous optimization and improvement loops.
It is essential not to label the FinOps initiative as "complete" or "finished." It remains in maintenance mode as a key business tool. Measure the program's success based on its integration into daily cloud planning and operations.
- All aspects of cloud services operate within the FinOps framework.
- Strategic planning for cloud services relies on FinOps data.
- Opportunities for improvement and optimization are easily identified, and changes are measurable, enabling metrics that demonstrate value.
Damon Garn owns Cogspinner Coaction and provides freelance IT writing and editing services. He has written multiple CompTIA study guides, including the Linux+, Cloud Essentials+ and Server+ guides, and contributes extensively to Informa TechTarget, The New Stack and CompTIA Blogs.
