We started at the beginning of the lifecycle, with Provisioning and Orchestration, and almost immediately found ourselves heading into some pretty dark technical waters. Cloud provisioning, permissions, blueprints, tags, refresh cycles… this was not our natural habitat. Luckily, we had help.
Technical reality checks (thank goodness)
We were incredibly fortunate to have Dr Tim Payne review what became the seven “technical” lifecycle processes, including:
- Maintain a Tagging Taxonomy
- Self-Service Permission and Access Control
- Cloud Blueprint Approvals
- Cloud Resource Refresh
- Cloud Resource Optimisation
Together, these processes describe how cloud resources are created, governed, optimised, and refreshed in a way that is scalable and automatable.
When Tim sent back his feedback, we braced ourselves for a complete rewrite. Instead, we were very relieved to discover that we’d got things broadly right. There were refinements and improvements (all sensible, all valuable), but no scorched earth. That was a big confidence boost.
FinOps – in context, not rewritten
We then moved on to the financial management aspects of cloud. These are the same underlying processes that FinOps focuses on – but we were clear from day one that we were not trying to replicate the depth or detail provided by the FinOps Foundation.
If you want to maximise the financial value of cloud in detail, FinOps is where you should go. If you want to understand how FinOps fits into the broader cloud lifecycle, and how financial management connects to provisioning, governance, optimisation and refresh, that’s where this process kit helps.
Governance, ISO, and one very interesting policy detour
As with our ITAM process kits, we aligned the CLMS to ISO/IEC 19770-1, the International Standard for IT Asset Management, helping organisations understand how strategy, policy, KPIs, audit, risk management, skills, tooling, communications, and information management all fit together in a cloud environment.
Policy turned out to be especially interesting. Again, Tim Payne came to the rescue – he helped us understand how policies written in human language are translated into code so that compliance can be automated. That insight led to a brand-new process: the Policy Curation process – which acts as a bridge between governance intent and technical enforcement.
CSFs, KPIs… and another Tim to the rescue
I’ll be honest: we hate CSFs and KPIs. Worse than that, we’re not actually very good at writing them, although Rory is better than either Brian or I.
Thankfully, we had help from another Tim – Tim Hughes – who went deep. Tim didn’t just define CSFs and KPIs; he went as far as identifying which function step each measurement should be taken at. This has been a dream of mine for a while now, but it took Tim H to actually achieve it! With a bit of help from Microsoft Co-pilot, to be fair.
We now probably have too many KPIs. So we’ve put them into a spreadsheet so people can pick and choose. Which is important! Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean you must. Please don’t try to use them all. Select what matters.
Five years in the making… and nearly there
This journey started almost five years ago. Although all the processes were written by October last year, my passion for quality (and yes, I probably am the one to blame, although Tim H is also culpable) meant we weren’t going to just throw it out there. The last six months have been spent reviewing, polishing, cross-checking, and making sure everything actually hangs together properly.
As I write this, I have four processes left to do a final review and approval, then we upload the kit to the website… and it’s on sale. So, we are very close (which is excellent timing, given Rory and I both have new contracts and are at serious risk of getting distracted again).
In the meantime, the CLMS Process Kit is available on pre-sale, with 50% off the retail price of £1495. That means you can get it for £747.50 using the discount code earlybird50. This voucher is valid until the kit goes on sale shortly!
Our hope is that this kit helps both ITAM and cloud-native practitioners step out of their silos and understand how technical, financial, and governance perspectives on cloud infrastructure all work together to deliver real value. Enjoy!!