Standards

FinOps teams struggle to get engineers to take action. This isn’t new. In a FinOps Foundation survey, 40% of respondents rated this issue as their top challenge. The diagnosis was that engineers are unaware of costs. They feel cost is not their responsibility. In addition, they work in environments where delivery deadlines drive effort. The conclusion was that it is an awareness and motivation problem. In every team I’ve coached so far, I’ve observed the same thing. It is not only about FinOps. Testers, for example, who don’t file clean defects. Or tech who don’t respect a 24-hour SLA. Or even developers who don’t run the required root cause analysis. ...

From what I saw, the escalation rate is the most misunderstood metric in tech operations. Every escalation is one of two things: Someone in support could have resolved it. For example: missing access rights, missing knowledge, no written standard for what a complete answer contains. Another situation I saw was that the ticket landed with the wrong person because the routing ran on assumed specialty, instead of actual skills and workload. Those are defects in the support system, so the support manager is responsible for them. Nobody in support could have resolved it because the software produced it. The answer lies in the code, in the data, or in a design decision made years ago. So the ticket climbs, level one to level two, then to level three. At the top of that ladder sits a maintenance team or a squad that inherited the codebase. Sometimes, it is nobody at all. Those are defects in the delivery system. You own them, and you almost never see them. ...