How to Assess the Maturity in FinOps Adoption

Published: April 10, 2024

Understanding a company’s FinOps maturity requires evaluating its performance across different domains and capabilities. This comprehensive understanding enables the identification of both strengths and areas for improvement, laying the groundwork for tailored action plans.

For every capability, it is crucial to assess proficiency across dimensions such as knowledge, processes, metrics in detail, adoption, and automation. In this article, I will furnish comprehensive insights into each of these levels, with a detailed understanding of their significance in the context of
FinOps maturity assessment.

Knowledge

This perspective considers the understanding and awareness of a particular capability in the company. At this level, it is assessed how widespread the concepts, mechanisms, terms and processes are in the company.

Procedures

This perspective considers the set of the actions being carried out to deliver the evaluated capability. It considers how well-defined and documented these activities are.

Adoption

This perspective considers how widespread a given capability is within a particular group.

Metrics

This pillar evaluates how metrics are defined and used for each capability. To be successful, it is necessary to measure and track progress over time. Additionally, it is necessary to understand how data is collected and its relevance.

Automation

This pillar, which requires a higher level of maturity, assesses how much tasks are being automated to bring speed, consistency, and consistency scale to the adoption of FinOps practices in the company.

For each of these foundational pillars, we have delineated the maturity levels into five stages: if that dimension is lacking, limited, progressing, if they are proficient in that dimension, or if they possess exemplary knowledge in it.

In order to establish a benchmark for our maturity, it is imperative to delineate our objectives, enabling meaningful comparisons. It is unrealistic to anticipate that a company will emerge as a knowledge leader across all 15 capabilities assessed.

Focusing on a single objective for the year, it may be pragmatic to strive for complete knowledge in the majority of the items, while accepting partial or developing knowledge in others. After a period, even with more in-depth knowledge from the experience of implementing a FinOps culture, the assessment should be carried out again, and the maturity objectives will certainly have changed. 

To gain an initial understanding of your company’s FinOps maturity, reach out to us to receive details about our maturity assessment process.

Filipe Barretto is AWS Practice Leader at e-Core and AWS Community Hero. Today, his main goal is to help companies better use cloud computing technologies to stand out.