Process is appealing. It provides structure and guidance and rules and boundaries. The challenge is that organizations are messy and complex. Projects are difficult. They require work and adaptation. You can’t just take process from one place, apply it to another, and expect it to work properly. You need to do something else.
Best Practices Usually Aren’t
There are few terms that have the same unbridled acceptance in business as “best practices.” Except that, for many organizations, best practices fail to deliver on the theoretical promise implied by the term. Best implies one superior way of working, where in reality there are many practices dependent upon many different things.
Pragmatic Practices—Not ‘Best’ Practices
I have long abhorred the term ‘best practice.’ What are labelled as ‘best practices’ often aren’t, or are only particularly useful and relevant in specific circumstances. The phrase is often used as a not-so-thinly-veiled effort at micromanagement, imposing the way someone wants something done through insinuating that not doing it that way would be in […]