You've seen the playbook:
1. Big consulting firm arrives with a team of 8 2. Three months of "assessment" 3. Beautiful 200-page deck 4. Recommendations for 18-month "transformation" 5. They leave. Nothing changes. Costs keep growing.
I've cleaned up after these engagements. The playbook is broken.
Here's what enterprise consulting gets wrong about cloud costs — and what actually works.
Big firms sell process. They deliver frameworks, roadmaps, and governance models.
What they don't deliver: actual savings.
"We'll help you build a FinOps Center of Excellence" sounds impressive. But did your cloud bill go down? Usually, no.
What works instead: Outcome-based engagements. Pay for results, not process. If the bill doesn't go down, the consultant doesn't get paid.Enterprise consultants are generalists. They did supply chain last month, cloud cost this month, maybe M&A integration next month.
They know frameworks. They don't know:
Every engagement starts with "assessment." Fair enough — you need to understand the problem.
But enterprise assessments take 2-3 months. They involve dozens of stakeholder interviews. They produce massive documentation.
Meanwhile, your cloud bill keeps growing.
Most assessments discover the same things:
Did we really need 3 months to figure that out?
What works instead: Time-boxed discovery. One week to identify the top 10 opportunities. Start fixing them while you continue assessing.Big firms love governance. Policies, approvals, committees, checkpoints.
"Before any engineer can provision resources, they must submit a cost impact analysis to the Cloud Governance Board for review."
This sounds responsible. It's actually counterproductive.
Governance creates friction. Friction slows down engineering. Slow engineering hurts the business.
And here's the dirty secret: heavy governance doesn't actually reduce costs. It just forces engineers to work around the governance.
What works instead: Enablement over governance. Make it easy to do the right thing. Automate cost guardrails. Let engineers move fast within boundaries."To effectively manage cloud costs, you need to restructure your organization. Create a Cloud Center of Excellence reporting to the CTO with dotted-line authority to Finance and..."
This is a 12-month project before you've saved a dollar.
What works instead: Work with the org you have. Find the people who care about costs. Empower them. Build momentum with quick wins. Organizational change follows success, not the other way around."We recommend implementing CloudHealth, Apptio, Kubecost, and our proprietary governance platform. Total licensing: $400K/year. Implementation: $600K."
A million dollars to see your costs more clearly. Impressive.
What works instead: Start with native tools. AWS Cost Explorer, Cost and Usage Reports, and Budgets are free and underutilized. Add third-party tools only when you've outgrown native capabilities.Enterprise consultants love multi-year roadmaps. Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3. It's predictable, plannable, and billable.
It's also absurd.
Cloud changes constantly. Your business changes constantly. An 18-month roadmap is fantasy.
By month 6, half your assumptions are wrong. By month 12, the roadmap is ignored. By month 18, nobody remembers it existed.
What works instead: 90-day sprints. Set aggressive goals. Execute. Measure. Adjust. Repeat."We'll address those unused resources in Phase 2 of the transformation."
Phase 2 is in 8 months. Those resources are burning money now.
Big firms deprioritize quick wins because they're not "strategic." They prefer complex, long-term initiatives that justify larger engagements.
What works instead: Start with quick wins. Delete the zombies. Buy the Savings Plans. Right-size the obvious stuff. Quick wins fund and justify the harder work.Consulting fees are paid regardless of outcomes. The firm gets $2M whether your costs go down or up.
This misaligns incentives. The firm is incentivized to deliver impressive-looking work, not effective work.
What works instead: Shared-savings models. Success fees. Guarantee-backed engagements. When the consultant only wins if you win, everything changes.Good consulting builds capability. Bad consulting builds dependency.
If the consultant leaves and everything falls apart, they didn't teach you anything. They just did things for you.
What works instead: Knowledge transfer from day one. Pair your team with consultants. Document everything. Goal: you shouldn't need them after engagement ends.Why do big consulting firms work this way?
Because their business model requires it.
They have massive overhead: expensive offices, layers of management, partner profit margins. They need large engagements to cover costs.
Large engagements require large scopes. Large scopes require long timelines. Long timelines require process over outcomes.
It's not malicious. It's structural.
When evaluating cloud cost help, look for:
1. Outcome guarantees: "We'll save you $X or you don't pay" 2. Speed: "We'll show results in weeks, not months" 3. Specialization: "Cloud cost is all we do" 4. Light touch: "We work with your team, not around them" 5. Aligned incentives: "We share in the savings"
If a firm can't offer these, ask yourself why.
You don't need a governance framework. You don't need an 18-month roadmap. You don't need a FinOps Center of Excellence.
You need lower cloud bills.
Find partners who deliver that. Skip the rest.
