FinOps solution for Telco Companies
Creating dashboards presenting a correlation between cloud hosting information (AWS, Azure, Google cloud) and application usage in order to save cost and optimize performance.
Summary
In the beginning
Amdocs, working with conservative telco companies, started a migration from on premise storage to cloud services. The available solutions for cloud cost management were: 1. expensive 2. Did not support the structure of telco verticals structure.
I was tasked with taking a rough idea by product management and refine it to a a working solution.
Preliminary Research
The first step is to dive into the world of cloud storage and the implication it created:
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What are cloud services and what is the difference between cloud services and premises infrastructure?
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What are the benefits and pinpoints of this change?
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The monetary aspect has moved from purchasing a one time product (servers or similar machines) to a service type economy - what are the new challenges?
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What happened to the organization as a result?
Preliminary study methods
Youtube
Lectures and reviews
I took 3 days' just to watch and listen to lectures about cloud computing, storage structure versus on premises, and learned how it is performed, cost of migration and benefits.
Articles and Knowledge centers
Review what is the fin-ops goals and KPIs, move from finance control to Dev-ops
Interviews
Operators - What is the day to day of a fin-ops operator.
Stakeholders - What is the vision for MVP and end goal.
Generative Research
After getting an insight into the field of cloud computing, learning the terminology, the structures and the processes involved, it was time to start building a comprehensive view of the jobs to be done and what was the boundaries of the system I was about to dive into.
Generative methods used
User interviews
Finops practitioners
Open interviews to get insight into the day to day work of a fin-ops person. The knowledge required, the pain points with the available solutions.
Competitors cognitive walkthrough
Working with design partners and finds experts
Data triangulation was done with professional personal from design partners working on available solutions
Jobs to be done
Mapping the needs and emotional process
Using interview material and working hand in hand with future end users, I mapped what are the actual goals for the operator, what is the KPI's they are measured by and what is the pinpoints in the process of each mapped job.
UX Wireframing
Each dashboard was set to achieve the jobs to be done that were identified during the research. This amounted to 8 dashboards serving different types of users and use cases to maximize the cloud computing triangle that was identified - Cost vs. Optimization vs. performance.
Click on the dashboard wireframe to get more information.
Evaluative Research
With every dashboard that was created, iterative process began, doing cognitive walkthroughs over the wireframes and in parallel the graphic design phase started to take part. As this project was completely done in remote, all interviews and cognitive walktroughs were done using internal communication systems by Amdocs.
In addition, journies were tested, using the see/do methodology to define user expectations and when a user is redirected to an outside system in context.
Operator journey analysis
Graphic design and real time testing
The entire project was done using grafana as a base for the ui as it is the platform used for the monitoring dashboards. The iterative process that began with the wireframe is consistent and the dashboards are constantly improved and honed according to user feedback.
Grafana - the selected technical view technology is aimed for big screens in war rooms. Support for interaction and response behavior were designed.
Light mode was also designed to better support day to day work.
