CFM (FinOps) assessment: Building a roadmap for financial success

Thank you everyone. Thank you for being here. I know last session of the day, very ambitious audience. So really thank you very much. 5:30. I know it is a stretch in this presentation. Hopefully I'll show you the keys for this financial success.

So within the cloud financial management topic and basically how one key trigger that we see in achieving this success. So it'll focus around the assessment, we will go into what is the importance of it.

So set the agenda, what is the importance of this assessment? What do we want to fix with it? So what goals are we trying to achieve with it and then show you a bit of what the assessment is, right? Just what show you a bit of a demo, get you a bit interested in doing it. It is a free assessment. So it's not something that we charge to do. So really, it's just to create awareness about it, right?

So let's speak a bit about the importance of this assessment. Fops is a space that falls almost in a no man land, right? So it's not quite technical, it's not quite financial so the person appointed to fix this problem, it's always sort of a fixer upper. And so this tends to be the reason why we find it to be one of the top challenges in the area.

And actually, when we tried looking into what are the top challenges in the fin op space, getting engineers to take actions was the number one problem, not technical implementation, not technically understanding what could be improved or optimized was really getting people to act and that's all operations, right? That's all you know, change management, acting, not really a technical expertise.

And so what we try to do with this assessment is really focus on that operational piece on that change management piece. And just to show you with some numbers how important it is and and really how key it is for the business.

What we have here is data that we've done in partnership with researchers to understand that importance and to understand the key value of having a fops practice and focusing on the operations part, not only on the change management, not only on the tech piece, and i would like to focus on two main points.

First of all, when the cloud activities are managed centrally, we see 38% more savings. Why? Because people are communicating, people are interacting, there is a mechanism in process, there is something in place that allows you to optimize smoothly and not as one of activities.

But more importantly, and more interesting is the second point. So there is a formal and strategic partnership between finance and technology. This one, you see that there's 22% more savings compared to customers that don't have this in place. There is 32% more slas met and the accuracy of the forecast is 46% higher.

So 46% more higher, more accurate forecasts. Why is this so well? It's very simple. So finance instead of seeing cloud as just another, it cost the fact that they are collaborating with the technical side, they will know more about it, they will be able to deconstruct what that cost is, right?

So what we want to do with this assessment, what we want to achieve with it is this is focusing on this operational piece focusing on this process, these tools, these mechanisms that you have to support the function more than just technical advisory.

So first of all savings, great, we all want to do them optimization, right? So what we want to do with this assessment is go beyond that. So what can you achieve that is beyond that? How can you have your forecast to be more accurate? How can you have your budgets to be more diligent and that you don't have any bill shocks, right? How can you have control of your costs seeing more than just 10% of them? Right.

So that's what we wanna do here, then it can be overwhelming, right? Financial management as a practice, it's overwhelming because there's no particular owner to it usually. And then for the amount of tests that need to be performed.

And so having clear best practices and a clear journey, defining a road map, defining next apps, defining priorities. That's one of the things we want to do with this assessment, right?

So here is what we hope to achieve with it is give customers a road map priorities and a set of clear actions they can take in order to improve their fins efficiency on to the assessment itself.

So the assessment focuses on the four pillars of cloud financial management, a lot of information in the slide, a lot to digest. Let me digest it for you.

So the four pillars of cloud financial management and this is the scope of the assessment. First of all, understanding, how are you at identifying your costs and reporting on them? So how are you at actually knowing what your costs are se how are you at optimizing them both optimizing rate and optimizing usage?

What mechanisms you have in place to guarantee that it's not a one off activity thirdly, planning and forecasting. So how are we at setting our budgets and how are we at setting our forecasts? So predicting the costs of our new workloads of the existing workloads as well.

And lastly and very important because it tends to be very overlooked. The operations piece. This one is how can we make sure that everything that we want to happen actually happens actually goes through, we actually execute on it.

So this is the piece of the puzzle that actually turns into the change management that i was mentioning before. Right now, what is this process that the tool follows? This is the flywheel that our tool. The capability assessment follows.

First of all, we collect the inputs, we gather with you the customer and we collect those inputs on how you are in those four pillars that i've mentioned before, we walk you through all of the different questions.

So it's a id of an enablement session and a collection of inputs, right? It's not a test, you're not being graded, you won't have credits based on that. You won't have rewards, you won't be penalized. It's really for your own awareness.

Then we input this into the tool. So you can also have nice visuals which i'll show in a bit. And in those visuals, you'll be able to see very clearly. Where are the areas that you need to focus more and where are the areas that you need to prioritize? Right?

Then you will have a full team of aws reps to support on this. So whatever we see that is needed to perform the assessment in the most efficient way we will provide. So if we need bdm support, we will support you if you need a time. And i say a partner or for example, any specialist or product teams, our goal is really to spot those gaps and help you fill them out and make you a report that is as rich as possible so that we can get to an output.

This output is a set of best practices and actions that you can digest in a powerpoint format. So very similar to what a consulting deck is. But unlike one, we will be as part of the package. So you will have bdm support to actually drive those actions and help you in making it happen.

And then, and what i think is the key differentiator here inspection. So a a way for us to constantly reiterate a way for us to constantly improve and not just say, ok, this is your score, good luck, you know.

So the idea here is that this is your score, let's do a plan to improve it and then let's check in uh at its due time again, how you're doing. Let's understand why. Let's understand what and let's keep on reiterating.

So this is the fly wheel, this is the mechanism on how it works. We have done it with many, many customers all over the world and we are getting very good feedback because we really are trying to tackle a part of fin ops that tends to be overlooked.

We're not coming with a technical analysis. We won't tell you that you need to update your gp twos to gp threes, we won't tell you very particular specific things, what we will help you with processes, mechanisms, tools strategy, right?

So how can we support you in these areas that you know, there's not that much focus in the organization? Right? And we do see that actually we get feedback. And now because of the tier number that we have, we start to have actually benchmarking data which we can also provide back to you.

So not only you will see how you stand, but you can see how you stand compared to others compared to the rest of the world in this, which you know, it's a very valuable piece of information, the details of the assessment.

So as i've mentioned before, 44 questions divided across the four pillars that we saw see safe plan and run of costs to make it simpler. We are, we have questions that are both qualitative and quantitative. And so this means that they will be subjective, they will come down to the opinion of someone which is very interesting because it generates discussions that we want to generate, right?

We see a lot of disagreement, we see a lot of internal fights, not fights but cooper disagreements and that's what we want to generate, right? We want to generate a place where someone from the technical side says, oh, we're doing this great and someone from another side says, actually we're not doing this well, this is what we want to achieve in this, it's this sort of disagreement is this sort of uh improvement by connecting.

And so that's why the qualitative questions as well, then each capability is ranked from 1 to 51 being the lowest five being the highest. And yes, you can do it on your own. So there's a way for us to share this assessment so that you can do it at your own pace at your own time, we advise you and we support you so that you can do it with us as well.

And by doing it with us, you do get sort of the challenging, right? So let's say you say that you rank a five, we will always challenge a five, right? We will always try to understand. Are you really a five? We will challenge what you think, what you do if it is company broad.

And so to make sure that if you are a five, which is incredible, we don't have many of those that we really get to the bottom of why you're a five and that for sure, it's validated that you are so right.

So now let's let me show you what the tool is actually about. So let me go here behind the ah lovely. So does it no good? Ok. So this is how the assessment looks like. This is the the portal that you will see once uh we give you access and once we share the screen and you'll see this once you do a guided assessment with aws, the format that it follows is you will have the title here. The number of the question a space for us to write.

Uh this is by the way, this is not a real customer. It's a customer. i invented all the comments are added by me. So there's really not that you want. It's not a scoop of information and then you have the rankings on the side for the guided piece.

We also have here an information. If reinvents internet allows, this won't take a long, long time. i never know when it refreshes. There we go. So you have here the piece of information. So if you, when in doubt, you will have a clear explanation of all of the different questions, right? But in all of the questions, usually it's very rare that i need to go to that side because it is quite intuitive and we tried making it as binary as possible for you to find your answer.

So let's take this one as an example, right? Employing an ws account strategy. Ok? So account management is manual, not used by all account owners. Account management is automated, not used by all account owners or used by all account owners, right? So it's a combination of yeses and nos based on what you do that will get you a very comfortable answer.

And here what we wanna do is mitigate the ambiguity, right? Reduce the ambiguity and get as concrete of an answer as we can on your organ, right? So what this does is we have divided on the four pillars that i've showed you. So see save, plan and run. And as you can see it all focuses on strategy mechanism.

So for example, this one a mechanism to forecast existing cloud workloads. So we're not asking, oh, so what is the system that you have? What is the tool that you have? What is the current machine learning model that you have? No, we're asking what is the mechanism that you have in order to forecast your costs, right? They're different because here you're inviting the the technology team to answer but also, and very importantly, the business and the financial teams to answer as well and that's who you want to get in a call.

That's the people that you want, engaged and actually having it part of the conversation and then on the cloud financial operations piece, all of the questions will be as far from technical as possible, right? So who is the owner of the fin s practice or cloud financial management cfm practice as we call it, what are the business partners within the organization?

So we evaluate that relationship that you have between finance and technology. And then for example, is it an organizational program or not? Are there trainings about it? So really, really we try to go deep into that operations piece that change management piece, not only the technical side, once that is done, once we have gone through all of the 44 questions we see here that the button doesn't go anywhere.

We're able actually to see a review panel where it gives us already a very visual understanding of where we stand. So when we go here, we will have a heat map with all of the different parts of the four pillars and how we rank among them.

And one of my particular favorite parts of the assessment, a scoring view. So you will see how you rank in the four pillars in all of these different areas. So in cost optimization, for example, we will have it very clear that technical cost optimization, not the strong suit of this customer, but for example, forecasting of new workloads, they are quite strong. Here is the remaining formatted transcript:

So why is this? So can we understand clearly what are the reasons? Can we add this to the road map of priorities? So let's say that the customer said that forecast and this happens, right? Forecast is a huge problem for us. We are we have this as a problem. We we have this as a priority and actually run the assessment with our teams and this is the score and this is something that we see every day. And actually it is already powerful enough that we can go back and say look it is not as bad as you think, right? There's many areas that you need to look into before prioritizing those forecasts that apparently and allegedly are doing quite well.

Right. So here is where we want to is basically making you opinion native on what you need to prioritize. And then one of the very cool features about this is the radar view. Why is the radar view good? Because it allows you to compare snapshots.

So let's say we do this in november of 2022 which was uh when i created this fake customer. And then we do this currently, it will show you comparatively how you are increasing through time, how are decreasing, hopefully increasing.

So how you are going about making your scores better? How are we giving you those suggestions? So you will be able to tell us, look, we've tried implementing that not really the the direction our organization wants or we want, we did this, it worked well, give me more of this, right?

So this is why it is useful is to give us a tangible base for us to understand how we can improve. And so once you've done all of this, we will generate that report with detailed recommendations for every single question, for every single area, right?

One interesting feature that i wanted to show you is we saw that there was this controversy, we saw that this was this disagreement within teams. And so when we were in a call, we saw actually that sometimes the more senior people would actually give more of their vote, which would mean that would decent the more junior stakeholders in the call to give their actual opinion, right? And this happens.

So that's why we created a polling feature. So what this polling feature does is you can generate a session, you can write the title of the of the session, you can write the password and then it will basically create a tab where people can vote on the score on that question and it's anonymous, right?

So let's say you got everyone on a call, you give them this polling and you say, ok, now time to vote on question three people vote, you see the scores and you're like, well, ok, everyone chose different options. How can we go about it? Write your comments, let's discuss this, which makes it a way more honest discussion at the end of the day, right?

So that's the power of this polling feature and that's something that we also promote if we send you this survey offline. So if you send you the assessment offline, this also works. So everyone that does the assessment, it will feed in to this main one and it will tell you how many people voted in each option.

So you will also see that along with the different comments of everyone, right? So very interesting. Now you see the assessment, you've seen the process. So what right, how can you, how can you go about it.

Well, reach out to your teams uh locally. If you're coming from a pe c latam, ia namir, just reach out my linkedin is my name. Uh it is in the thank you. Slide. It's george lobo. If you need interest, if you are interested in running one, you can reach out to me.

Um please make as many questions as you want. If you interact with the team, then they will help you in either doing a guided assessment or you can perform one with uh a specialist. And so you can actually understand if you are a partner, we also can do it with you or we can enable you undo it to customers as well, right?

It is something that we, we know that pins is a pressing topic and i want to make sure that our customers are as enabled and share and implementing as many best practices as possible. So reach out, make sure that you interact with us if you want to run it again, don't think about this as a one off activity.

This is an iterative process, a never ending process that we want you to, you know, hopefully improve with time and with our help. So thank you very much for your time. It was lovely meeting you today.