Re:81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending
by vidarh on Wednesday October 19, 2022 @06:24AM
(#33260021)
As an anecdote on the knowing where money is going front:
One of the most effective ways I've found to drive change in how product management and execs treat engineering was getting average salary numbers by type of position for my team out of HR, and attributing costs toward every major feature request + meetings in a weekly report.
My manager at the time, the CEO of a VC funded startup, did not see the point. We were after all already paying for the engineers, and they were always fully loaded. Until he'd seen a couple of reports, and saw what it told us about prioritisation.
Our project and product managers got a lot less meeting-happy after seeing one regular meeting they were very fond of cost an estimated 10k/month due to the number of people attending, and they got a lot more thoughtful about feature request and how to prioritize after seeing the real costs of supposedly "trivial" requests that had previously been slipped past normal processes.
Same applies on the cloud front, yet a lot of what has driven the adoption of cloud is that it often helps engineering escape cost analysis and efforts to optimize costs.
And so you get organisations which often have no idea which decisions contribute what to those costs.
One of the most effective ways I've found to drive change in how product management and execs treat engineering was getting average salary numbers by type of position for my team out of HR, and attributing costs toward every major feature request + meetings in a weekly report.
My manager at the time, the CEO of a VC funded startup, did not see the point. We were after all already paying for the engineers, and they were always fully loaded. Until he'd seen a couple of reports, and saw what it told us about prioritisation.
Our project and product managers got a lot less meeting-happy after seeing one regular meeting they were very fond of cost an estimated 10k/month due to the number of people attending, and they got a lot more thoughtful about feature request and how to prioritize after seeing the real costs of supposedly "trivial" requests that had previously been slipped past normal processes.
Same applies on the cloud front, yet a lot of what has driven the adoption of cloud is that it often helps engineering escape cost analysis and efforts to optimize costs.
And so you get organisations which often have no idea which decisions contribute what to those costs.