FinOps — When to have a FinOps Team
FinOps — When to have a FinOps Team.
The purpose of a FinOps function is to collaborate with business, finance and engineering teams to get the most value out of technology.
Simply put; you should have a dedicated FinOps team when the value that team generates is greater than what you will need to pay them.
That’s how this works.
There are no benchmarks and rules that I know of currently for exactly when this will be. So I’ll give my current best estimate.
All of the cultural and financial aspects of FinOps are applicable in organisations of all sizes but realistically small organisations should either distribute parts of the role or have someone do it in an auxiliary manner. The smallest organisations are naturally the most cost sensitive so it’s least necessary there as they should already be paranoid about cost!
However if you are a small organisation which is heavily funded and intend to grow quickly it could be wise to ensure you have FinOps engineering expertise in from the beginning as the Cloud and SaaS market really can be a dangerous and unforgiving place especially when things are moving fast. It would be wise to consider this at least.
When you’re spending maybe $50k a month it’s probably time to ensure someone really versatile has FinOps as their primary role even if they do other things too. At $100k you probably want this sort of person to be dedicated as at over $1m a year there is certainly enough to consistently wrangle and manage with interventions and optimisations.
At $10m a year you should certainly have a mature team and in the middle you would need to work out markers for some growth and development of the function based on current impact and workload. You’re unable to make strategic progress if time is filled with useful but repetitive work.
Otherwise the more teams / business units / departments that are in play the more a central FinOps function is necessary.
I think spend is a good proxy for when because the more money there is the more room for error and regression, the more need for analysis, the more variability in skills and knowledge across usage and the more impact you can have by scaling current practises out.
Remember to always carefully track the FinOps teams impact quantitatively and qualitatively so value is understood.
