The 5 Cs of FinOps: communication

A cloud financial management or FinOps practice can maximize your value as you migrate more workloads to the cloud. It is a collaborative discipline where all stakeholders take ownership of their cloud usage with support from a central best practices group.

A strong FinOps practice incorporates the 5 Cs of FinOps to get the most value from the cloud.

Here is a blog article about the first C: a culture of accountability.

Now, let’s talk about the second C of the 5 Cs of FinOps: communication.

Second C of FinOps: communication

It's critical to communicate when implementing a practice that affects many people. FinOps requires a well-planned, top-down change strategy with communication from executive sponsors and champions. Evangelizing the value FinOps requires multiple delivery methods, including internal videos, emails, SharePoint, Yammer, Slack, or other tools leveraged in your organization.

Executives and FinOps sponsors should communicate with stakeholders during all three FinOps phases:

1. Information

Start by creating a dashboard that lets business units see their exact cloud costs. You can also bring together representatives from each team to form a cloud center of excellence (Cloud CoE). Once established, a Cloud CoE can provide insights into your organization's entire cloud footprint.

2. Optimize

Stakeholders will learn to identify, execute, and measure optimizations in this phase. You will also create a communications strategy that keeps teams informed and trained about cloud costs and usage.

3. Operate

During this process, teams will continuously evaluate their business objectives and the FinOps metrics they track against them. They will see how adhering to FinOps practices can help them achieve their goals.

During each phase, stakeholders must know what's in it for them and why it's essential to act upon the FinOps recommendations. Motivating stakeholders will help them work individually and collectively to achieve your organization's goals.

A lack of communication is common

When SoftwareOne holds FinOps workshops with new organizations, we often find a lack of communication. Teams learn more about their environment during our workshops than expected. For example, an organization may have put effort into reporting or strategic tagging policies that the teams deploying in the cloud didn't know about.

Prioritizing communication has an immediate impact.