FinOps assessment
A FinOps assessment involves a repeatable, measurable, and careful analysis of your FinOps practice's maturity. Guided by the FinOps Framework, this analysis provides deep insights into the strengths of your FinOps practice and identifies areas for improvement.
Define assessment goals
Understand capability maturity and select the capabilities to assess.
Identify valuable target groups within the organization to assess.
Set an assessment baseline
Determine the processes and tools for the assessment.
Perform an initial assessment at an appropriate level of detail.
Continuous Assessment
Set a schedule to reassess or expand the assessment scope and the teams involved.
Re-evaluate goals.
Reassess as needed.
Definition
Assessing FinOps practices allows the FinOps team to measure its effectiveness, align FinOps activities with organizational goals, and identify where enhancing these activities provides the most value. Organizations can assess their FinOps capabilities at each stage of maturity.
Organizations use assessments to measure current capabilities and focus on those that have the greatest impact on creating value from the cloud. Assessments are typically conducted for target groups. These groups are specific segments of the organization composed of different representative roles. Target groups have different perspectives and needs. This means that you may need to assess different capabilities in different departments. As an organization's cloud usage and complexity grow, activities are required across a broader range of capabilities.
A successful FinOps program must measure the effectiveness of its practices against current needs and assess the maturity of its target groups. This analysis determines the future strategy and direction of the FinOps practice.
A FinOps assessment helps you understand the maturity of all or part of your practice. It defines a target state that aligns with organizational goals. It also creates a path to achieve those goals. By linking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to goals, the FinOps team can more clearly identify unmet goals, areas that require assessment, and domains that need increased maturity.
Assessing a subset of FinOps capabilities and small target groups is more effective than assessing the entire FinOps framework. The FinOps team should first conduct a self-assessment before assessing other target groups. Through targeted conversations with small groups, assessors can gain a deeper understanding of current maturity and effectiveness.
A key secondary goal of a FinOps assessment is to foster collaborative understanding across various roles and organizational levels. As a joint activity, the FinOps team can use an assessment to promote good behaviors, reinforce common terminology, and encourage cost awareness throughout the organization.
The FinOps Assessment Working Group has published guidance for implementing FinOps assessments. The FinOps Assessment Guide and Tools, published by the FinOps Foundation, can help accelerate the development of your assessment capabilities.
Maturity assessment
Crawl
Organizations with little to no cloud usage conduct a FinOps assessment with the core FinOps team annually.
Set future annual goals with clear KPIs based on the assessment results.
The FinOps team manually records the assessment results.
Movement
As the organization's cloud usage becomes more extensive and complex, the core FinOps team completes a FinOps assessment semi-annually or quarterly.
Track annual goals against assessment results, and adjust them as needed after each assessment.
Use the assessment to identify specific capabilities and assess areas where Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are not consistently met.
Use a consistent assessment format. This lets you compare changes across different target groups and time periods.
Appoint a FinOps assessor within the core FinOps team. This assessor maintains a knowledge base of key questions to use in assessments.
Complete FinOps assessments with business units or dedicated FinOps teams, even if you do not have a fixed assessment cadence.
Run
Cloud usage is complex and extensive, involving many teams across the organization. The core FinOps team conducts quarterly FinOps assessments.
Track annual goals against assessment results.
Adjust annual goals as needed after each assessment.
Assess additional FinOps capabilities based on KPIs.
Use a consistent assessment format to effectively compare changes over time.
Both the core FinOps team and dedicated business unit FinOps teams have trained assessors.
Maintain a central database of assessment results, with questions organized by capability.
A dedicated FinOps evangelist regularly completes FinOps assessments for business units.
Results from business unit FinOps assessments are shared with the core and partner teams.
Proactively share assessment training and expectations with engineering and other teams.
Functional activities
FinOps practitioner
Advocate for consistent and accurate FinOps assessments. Ensure the team has sufficient assessors.
Analyze assessment results to establish goals for the broader practice.
Product
Participate in assessments openly and honestly. Share your expertise in specific capabilities, FinOps practices, or processes.
Lead FinOps assessments for your business unit. Share the findings with your team.
Apply findings from FinOps assessments to your daily work. Incorporate them into sprint planning and other product decisions.
Finance
Participate in assessments openly and honestly, and contribute your knowledge of specific capabilities, FinOps practices, and processes.
Drive FinOps assessments for your business unit and share the results with your team.
Apply findings from FinOps assessments to your daily work and financial decisions.
Procurement
Participate in assessments openly and honestly, and contribute your knowledge of specific capabilities, FinOps practices, or processes.
Drive FinOps assessments for your business unit and share the results with your team.
Incorporate findings from FinOps assessments into your daily work and procurement decisions.
Engineering
Participate openly and honestly in assessments and contribute your knowledge of specific capabilities, FinOps practices, and processes.
Drive FinOps assessments for your business unit and share the results with your team.
Incorporate lessons from FinOps assessments into your daily work and architectural decisions.
Management
Set clear business goals to enable the FinOps team to assess its impact on the organization.
Support the FinOps team with prioritization and resource allocation to enable the FinOps team and business units to conduct assessments.
Encourage business units to participate in FinOps assessments to foster a culture of transparency and accountability.
Success metrics and KPIs
The FinOps Assessment Guide includes a section on metrics that explains how to measure specific capabilities. Each capability has corresponding KPIs, which are evaluated during an assessment.
To benchmark against industry data, the FinOps team can refer to the latest or previous State of FinOps Survey. You can assess all FinOps capabilities by reviewing the complete list of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to find those that best suit your organization and specific capabilities. For a complete list of FinOps KPIs, see the KPI Library.
The FinOps team can also create project KPIs to evaluate the assessment program. Examples of these KPIs include the following:
Number of FinOps assessments completed per year for each capability dimension.
Percentage of business units that have been assessed.
Percentage of the FinOps framework that has been assessed.
Number of employees trained in FinOps assessment.