All tagged best practices
Best practices often get a bad name. But if they ossify into "the way we do things around here" then it becomes very difficult to install new ways of thinking operating and working. Even with all the cool tehcnology we have at our fingertips, the way we work can block many things.
PEX Network has some useful thoughts on best practices and benchmarking. Best practices are only indicators of what you really want - results. Don't confuse the two.
Rather than asking how we do things, we need to learn from how we think about things. That is the way to translate "best practices" from one place to another.
There are a lot of interesting conversations happening recently about knowledge management and the value of knowledge sharing or knowledge collecting and what it all means. KM is about taking action.
Mark Gould has a discussion of "best practice" that reminds me just how important it is to have a regular policy of looking for other examples of how something has been done before doing it myself.
Brett Miller has some interesting thoughts about memory and anti-memory. Maybe we need to learn how to forget.
A new HBS working paper by Deishin Lee and Eric Van den Steen, "Managing Know-How," looks at companies that keep best practices and model employee use of the best practices and company decisions about recording new practices with an economic model.
Christian Wagner discusses the problems with knowledge acquisition and suggests that wikis in combination with communities might be a solution for knowledge acquisition where more formal processes have failed.
Ross Mayfield kicked off a winding discussion with "The End of Process" in which he complains that "process" is over-used. Many others have contributed to the discussion, in case you haven't seen it.
Dinesh Tantri talks about a new approach to best practices within in his organization where employees are encouraged to challenge best practices and work out their resolution within communities tied to those practices.
The March/April 2002 issue of Ivey Business Journal had a piece by Nancy Dixon, "The Neglected Receiver of Knowledge Sharing." Dixon presents a helpful perspective to the concept of knowledge sharing, and one that I've heard in pieces previously. The discussion also makes it clearer why best practice databases have such a hard time of it in the KM community.
Michael McLaughlin writes "The Worst Thing About Best Practices." In isolation, I absolutely agree with McLaughlin. However, if they are part of an intelligent process, such as he suggests at the end of the article, best practices can be quite helpful.