Establishing a Decision & Accountability Structure Capability
This involves defining roles and responsibilities, bridging gaps between teams, and enabling cross-functional collaboration and conflict resolution to bridge operational cloud cost management gaps between teams.
CloudMonitor features related to Establishing a FinOps Decision & Accountability Structure
Resource Owners
Every resource and Cost Group has an assignable “Owner” who is the person accountable for the management of the resource. This can be changed or inherited from the Cost Group.
The Created By and Created On are surfaced for visibility but cannot be changed.
Drive Accountability with Issue Assignment
Combining CloudMonitor alerts allows you to raise tickets for each Recommendations and Cost Anomaly and assign it to various staff to see it through to resolution.
Teams Workflow
Encourage engineers to take action by communicating with them in the current workflow. CloudMonitor sends Cost Anomalies and Recommendcations to Owners in Teams. This drives visibility and ownership of FinOps issues.
Owners
Have a transparent overview of cloud costs and resource ownership. By listing individual owners alongside the costs and resources they’re responsible for, this feature reinforces accountability and ensures clear lines of authority, making it easier for decision-makers to act quickly and consistently.
Establishing a FinOps Decision & Accountability Structure Definition
The FinOps decision and accountability structure refers to the organization’s FinOps-related roles, responsibilities, and activities that bridge operational cloud cost management gaps between teams. It is important for organizations to establish a clear FinOps Decision and Accountability Structure, such as a management hierarchy of decision-making authority and accountability. This structure should be well documented, with clear cadence/time horizons for decisions set. Management should be involved with implementing and supporting these procedures and standards. Regular use and review of FinOps metrics can help with decision making and planning. Well-defined relationships and processes allow for strategic planning and for the organization to react and make decisions quickly and in a consistent manner. Decision-making power driven further towards the edge of the organization empowers individuals with context and control.
The maturity assessment of an organization’s FinOps Decision & Accountability Structure can be divided into four stages: Crawl, Walk, Run, and Fly. The crawl stage has a simple hierarchy of decision-making authority and accountability with limited documentation of the Decision and Accountability structure and processes. The walk stage has a clearly defined hierarchy of decision-making authority and accountability with well-documented Decision and Accountability structure and processes that have become standard. Management is involved with implementing and supporting these procedures and standards. The run stage has a clear and well-documented FinOps Decision & Accountability Structure relationships and processes with regular standardized FinOps decision-making processes in place, utilizing agreed FinOps metrics. Management can review current analytics and decide whether or not to make strategic changes. The fly stage has processes in place to continuously review and improve the FinOps Decision & Accountability Structure performance .
