How To Build Your Own FinOps Practitioner
In which Joe describes how he built his FinOps teams. Afterwards, there is a trip down nostalgia lane.
Hiring an experienced FinOps practitioner . . . in THIS economy???
An amazing thing happened in 2021. Amazing, yet to those of us who have been practicing FinOps for years now, not surprising at all. The demand for FinOps practitioners has far outpaced the supply of available practitioners. Each week I have watched jobs being posted for FinOps roles across the globe and competition for experienced practitioners is fierce.
Given our current environment, you may need to consider developing the talent you have rather than trying to hire someone with experience. For the most part, I built my FinOps teams from scratch. You can be successful taking this route as well. Here are tips on how to do it.
How to Find Your FinOps Practitioner:
Departments/Roles That I hired from:
Capacity Management
Cloud Engineering
IT Finance
IT Project Management
IT Portfolio Management
Data Analytics
These are areas with extremely different backgrounds. The one similar trait everyone I hired shared was that they had a high capacity for learning. FinOps is about driving culture and process across departments and that takes learning about how each department works, plus the never-ending learning about cloud services and pricing schemes.
How do you figure out if someone has a high capacity for learning? They identify themselves by saying “This may be a dumb question but . . .” and then they ask the dumb question despite knowing it is dumb and obvious to those who already learned it. This is different than people who don’t ask any questions or, worse, ask the dumb question but act like they just stumbled into a new understanding that no one has yet discovered. You want the people who acknowledge they have a lot to learn and then go about the business of learning it.
Stay away from anyone who says ‘this is the way it’s always been done.” Likely you are trying to drive change and being stuck in the way things have been done isn’t a great way to change them.
How to Train Your FinOps Practitioner
First, read this book: Cloud FinOps: Collaborative, Real-Time Cloud Financial Management!
I also encouraged my team members to join the FinOps Foundation. It’s free and was a great way to ask other practitioners how they solve the same problems my team was facing.
The next step is to have them go and learn!
(...you remember what I said about "that one trait" everyone I hired had right? )
Training that I encouraged/required them to take:
Don’t act so surprised. Yes I required (and expensed) the Certified FinOps Practitioner training for my new team members. This is a great foundation into learning FinOps best practices.
Google Associate Cloud Engineer
Microsoft Certified Azure Fundamentals
Fundamental training in your cloud of choice. Links to the Big 3 above. Is the expectation for everyone to become cloud engineers? Absolutely not - the expectation is that they can work with cloud engineers and not get tripped up while discussing fundamental services. I was not an engineer and never pretended to be one. I simply knew what the cloud services were and how they were priced. That was the key.
For deeper cloud knowledge, I leveraged A Cloud Guru/Coursera. If your company has other training resources, leverage these as most training resources have come a long way in the last few years.
This is a new one and I highly recommend it for a bit later in your FinOps practitioner’s development. At the time of this writing, the first class is going through and I’m watching the cohort as they learn how to implement best practices. It’s one thing to know what the best practices are - which is often challenging enough. It’s another level to train on implementing them.
And never forget: “Let me google that for you.” We have all of the world's knowledge at our fingertips: www.google.com. You go there, you type in your question, and hit enter. It’s as simple as that, yet most people forget to try it.
Grow Your FinOps Practitioner
Rules for managing your new practitioner:
Always have their back in public. You can correct their mistakes in private. Do you want them to grow and trust you? Then stick up for them in public. Teach them in private. Remember, you are likely trying to change processes and culture. Your FinOps practitioner is going to face pushback at some point. Grow their confidence by showing in public that you support them.
“Let me get back to you on that,” is the correct answer for when someone asks a question and you have no idea what they are talking about. Make sure your new FinOps practitioner understands that and doesn’t make commitments that can’t be followed through on.
Become friends with your finance/accounting department. Notice how I didn’t put any finance or accounting training up there? It’s because - at least in the US - GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) rules have materiality thresholds that allow each company to apply the rules in their own way. Each company is just a little bit different and you need to learn from your finance/accounting partner how they work for you.
Strive for transparency and credibility. If people see it and believe it, everything gets easier.
You got this. You can grow your very own FinOps practitioner.
Or you can just throw a boatload of money at someone else's. However, when someone else does the same thing to you, you’ll want to know how to grow a new one again.
Nostalgia Playlist:
My esteemed colleague, Vasilio M, and I were discussing ‘90s music. Ready to argue with anyone who would disagree, I declared the ‘90s the best decade of music ever in the history of the world. Vas, being the foremost Canadian thought-leader of topics to debate (or as Canadians call it, ‘accomodating’) over beers - pointed out that nostalgia is good for mental health.
I had never considered this and asked Google about it. It took me to this link of an article from the New York Times that I highly recommend. I love this quote from Dr. Constantine Sedikides: “Nostalgia made me feel that my life had roots and continuity.” I immediately connected with that sentiment. Another amazing call out in the article is that worldwide, despite different cultures, we are all nostalgic about the same topics. Nostalgia is something that links us all together.
Music from the ’90s made me feel nostalgic. We all feel nostalgic. Therefore . . . the ’90s are the greatest decade of music ever, full stop.
My Nostalgic ‘90s Playlist:
Return of the Mack - Mark Morrison
In The Meantime - Spacehog
What’s Up - 4 Non Blondes
Santa Monica - Everclear
Buddy Holly - Weezer (I have definite opinions about Weezer and they are 100% represented by Leslie Jones here.)
And a bonus song from the Queen of Australia: Torn - Natalie Imbruglia