Based on the four dimensions of FinOps adoption (Visibility, Training/Best Practices, Data, and Awareness), “The FinOps Cloud Quest” is a week-long gamified event. The goal is to create a psychologically safe, blameless environment where teams are incentivized to learn, explore, and uncover optimization opportunities.
Disclaimer: I work at Google in the cloud team. Opinions are my own and not the views of my current employer.
Game Mechanics
- Team Structure: Participants compete in squads (e.g., existing engineering or product teams).
- The Leaderboard: A centralized dashboard showing team points, updated daily.
- Points & Badges: Teams earn points for completing daily quests (Knowledge) and bonus points for identifying potential savings (Optimization).
- The Golden Rule: Blamelessness. Teams are celebrated for finding past inefficiencies, not punished for them.
The 5-Day Schedule
Day 1: The Awareness Awakening (Dimension: Create Awareness)
Goal: Mobilize the teams, communicate the FinOps charter, and build community.
The Quest: “The FinOps Scavenger Hunt.”
- Read the company’s FinOps Charter or strategic vision document.
- Find 3 “Easter Eggs” hidden in the document or the FinOps internal portal.
- Introduce your squad in the dedicated FinOps chat channel with a team name and mascot.
Points: 50 points for completing the hunt; 20 bonus points for the most creative team introduction.
Day 2: The Visibility Voyage (Dimension: Make Information Visible)
Goal: Get teams familiar with cost visibility dashboards, budgets, and alerts.
The Quest: “Dashboard Detectives.”
- Log into the Cost Visibility Dashboard.
- Identify the top 3 most expensive cloud services used by their specific product/team.
- Configure one proactive budget alert for their environment.
Points: 100 points for submitting the screenshot of the configured alert and the top 3 services.
Day 3: The Data Dive (Dimension: Start Collecting Data)
Goal: Improve metadata (tagging/labeling) and contribute to the cross-team knowledge base.
The Quest: “The Great Tagging Challenge & Wisdom Share.”
- Identify and apply correct labels/tags to 10 untagged cloud resources.
- Submit one “Lesson Learned” or past architectural mistake to the FinOps Knowledge Base.
Points: 10 points per successfully tagged resource. 100 points for submitting a lesson learned.
Day 4: The Upskilling Utopia (Dimension: Invest in a Training Program)
Goal: Continuous learning and skill development.
The Quest: “Skill-Up Sprint.”
- Complete a short (15–20 min) self-service FinOps training module or read an approved reference architecture.
- Pass the “FinOps Friday Eve” trivia quiz.
Points: 100 points for training completion. Variable points based on quiz score.
Day 5: The Optimization Hackathon (The Grand Finale)
Goal: Find actionable optimization opportunities.
The Quest: “The Cloud Cost Busters.”
- Teams have 4 hours to review their infrastructure to find optimization opportunities (e.g., zombie servers, oversized instances, unattached storage, idle environments).
- Submit a “Business Case” detailing the finding, the proposed fix, and the estimated daily/monthly savings.
Points: 50 points per valid submission.
Grand Prize: The “Cloud Optimizer Badge” and a physical reward for the team that identifies the highest actionable savings.
Preparation Plan
To ensure the FinOps Week is a success, you need a solid preparation phase.
1. People (Enablement & Culture)
- Executive Sponsor: Secure a senior leader (e.g., CIO, CTO or CFO) to send the kickoff email and announce the prizes. This validates the strategic vision.
- FinOps Champions (Game Masters): Identify 2–3 FinOps advocates to run the event, moderate the chat channels, score the submissions, and answer questions.
- The Participants: Pre-register teams. Ensure Product Owners and Engineering Managers allocate capacity for their teams to participate (e.g., 1–2 hours a day).
- Psychological Safety: Explicitly communicate that finding waste is a success to be celebrated, not a failure of past engineering.
2. Process (Governance & Mechanics)
- Define “Optimization”: Create clear criteria for what counts as a valid optimization opportunity for Day 5 (e.g., must be a non-production environment, or must have a specific utilization threshold).
- Prize Strategy: Define the rewards. These should be a mix of intrinsic (recognition in town halls, badges) and extrinsic (swag, team lunch, gift cards).
- Communication Plan:
T-minus 2 weeks: Teaser campaign (“The Quest is coming”).
T-minus 1 week: Rules, team registration, and scheduling blocks.
During the week: Daily morning kickoff messages and end-of-day leaderboard updates.
Post-week: Celebrate the wins, summarize the identified savings, and outline next steps for implementing the fixes.
3. Technology (Tools & Data)
- The Leaderboard & Hub: Set up an intranet landing page or a dedicated chat channel. This acts as the “door opener” mentioned in the article.
- Cost Visibility Dashboards: Ensure dashboards are functional, up-to-date, and access is provisioned for all participants before Day 2. If teams can’t see their costs, the game fails.
- Knowledge Base Sandbox: Create a centralized wiki, Jira project, or Google form where teams will submit their “Lessons Learned” and Day 5 “Business Cases.”
- Automated Validation (Optional): If possible, use scripts to automatically validate if teams have set up budget alerts (Day 2) or correctly tagged resources (Day 3) to reduce the manual scoring burden on the Game Masters.
The FinOps Cloud Quest: A 5-Day Gamified FinOps Week was originally published in Google Cloud – Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Source Credit: https://medium.com/google-cloud/the-finops-cloud-quest-a-5-day-gamified-finops-week-3d90678bf20a?source=rss—-e52cf94d98af—4
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