Enable Celebration of Achievements

Celebrating achievements is important as it creates a positive, self-propelling culture.

We recommend two tools to help teams celebrate their cost saving and avoidance achievements as important enablers for a FinOps culture: Saving Logs and Defined Saving Periods.

Implementing a Savings Log

We recommend implementing a central Savings Log, utilising an off the shelf opportunity tracking tool. All members of the cloud community should be enabled to raise opportunities in the log. We recommend that they will be recognised in an appropriate manner for doing so.

Keeping track of savings achieved is an important enabler of the wider FinOps function. In addition, new saving opportunities will present themselves and being able to triage and prioritise each, without losing sight of those not yet actioned, will facilitate the right culture.

Saving opportunities are ‘won’ with a defined Net Savings: the Actual Saving minus Cost of Achieving the Saving. Savings achieved and enabled on the basis of logged items will provide a good tracking, articulating the benefits of your investment in your FinOps team and operation.

Defined Saving Recognition Period

We recommend a 6-month period to apply for recognition of Saving and Avoidance. This should be done on an ‘actual achieved’ basis.

Achieved savings create room for further investment. It is important to agree a realistic ‘recognition period’ upfront. Extrapolating and recognising Savings and Avoidance over a longer period, say the next 3 – 5 years, can lead to counter-productive behaviour.