Ithuta JV

Source - Article by Bob Andrew

Project management teams are generally requested, encouraged, and often instructed, to ensure that ‘best practices’ are used. These practices are techniques, processes, methods, activities that current ‘conventional wisdom’ regards as being the most effective for delivering particular project outcomes in specific conditions or circumstances.

The fundamental premise behind the idea of best practices is that it is believed possible to reproduce the successes of those who excel by imitating the practices that they use. Although this might seem obvious and uncontroversial, there are many project managers who have lived through implementation of best practices on their projects and who came to realise that such prescriptions do not guarantee success.

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In the context of project management, best practices are often based on many assumptions, such as that all project management teams are the same and that what’s best for one is best for all, that best practices can be transferred and that best practices can be applied without a comprehensive understanding of the problem that has to be addressed. If these assumptions are not valid, the likelihood of a best practise being the right way to work will be very low.

The term ‘lessons learned’ is often used interchangeably with ‘best practice’. Lessons learned are the perfect 20:20 hindsight that arises during and after completing a project and can provide very valuable information for similar projects in the future. Every project is, however, unique, and unless the differences in the new project and the way the project environment might differ are well understood, the lessons learned could have as little value as some of the so-called best practices. Capturing lessons learned and using them as foresight for future projects, rather than using them as prescriptive measures, will foster project success.

Best practices can also discourage enquiry and innovation as by their nature they invoke adoption without question. As Sir Francis Bacon stated: “When you wish to achieve results that have not been achieved before, it is an unwise fancy to think that they can be achieved by using methods that have been used before”, innovation for increased value and performance needs a continual assessment of current methods and procedures .

Perhaps instead of a devotion to best practices, we should rather look at some high-level strategies for accomplishing successful projects as Harold Kerzner has done (Strategic Planning Using a Project Management Maturity Model), such as: ensuring that common project management terminology is used, that defined common processes are applicable and repeatable, that the project methodology is synergistic with all corporate methodologies and that there is a continuous evaluation and benchmarking process to promote continuous improvement. If these strategies are adopted, each project team will develop its own best practices for that particular project and specific conditions and circumstances.