Best, good and bad practices

Why

Why reinvent the wheel? Incorporating what others have learned is an important best practice.

How

Search for best practices elsewhere, based on desirable project outcomes. Study them, learn from what’s been done, and how it’s done. Adapt them to suit your own environment and then implement them. Evaluate the results.

Ingredients

• Willingness to investigate what others have done.

• A sense of scope: which practices are important to you, which are not?

• A critical sense of success factors: do other people’s successes really apply to you?

• Ability to overcome the ‘not invented here’ syndrome.

• Organised activities aimed at sharing experiences.

Practice

Ideally, good practices tend to be repeated, but few companies have the required processes to identify and incorporate best practices described by others.