Establish Best Practices as the Standard, Not Aspirational Ceiling
Best practices is treated like a buzzword phrase within digital strategy and transformation projects, although the issue with this starts with the superlative nature of the phrase.
Literally, best practices establishes a ceiling, which is an aspirational goal.
This creates an issue if we expect people to follow best practices consistently, as anything short of it is considered to be "on track" or a "failure", depending on whether you're a glass half full or half empty person.
Let's drop the use of best practices and replace it with minimum acceptable standards.
The reasons for this are simple, as we want to establish a floor or foundation on which other things are built.
Standards remove ambiguity as you can easily document what is expected of a project, a role, etc and point to examples that show how the standard is applied within your team or organization
Consistency drives performance and builds confidence as teams are able to demonstrate they're meeting the quality expected from internal and external stakeholders
Accountability becomes easier to track as people can meet or exceed the standard, and anything short of the standard is obvious based on how your standards are defined
To adopt the minimum acceptable standard mindset, you'll need to follow a few steps:
Document what your standards are
Provide examples of meeting standards
Create a step to track accountability
Document what your standards are
You'll need to look at what your best practices are (if they're even documented) and discuss with your team or organization what your baseline is, has been, or should be.
If you're struggling with a long list, lean on the MSCW framework to categorize each and use those items labeled as "must" as your baseline.
Provide examples of meeting standards
For each aspect of your standards, ensure that you can point to examples that show how it has been met or exceeded. Also, it helps to have examples that show something that has fallen short.
A simple and effective way to do this with different types of documentation is a mixture of sidebar comments and color highlighting. Create a copy of each example and annotate it, allowing a person to see side by side how the standard applies.
Create a step to track accountability
Make it easy for managers and individual contributors to track accountability to your minimum acceptable standards. Add a reporting step into your business process, as this allows people to attest they have met or exceeded a standard, plus provides an opportunity for oversight.
Ensure that is communicated as a positive step, as your organization is looking to evolve or grow the set of examples, plus it offers visibility into individual and team performance.
Throughout this process, there should be communication around why and how things are changing. Don't wait till you're ready to switch to have an "all hands" or "office hours" on the topic.
TLDR: Clearly define your standards, track accountability to meeting and exceeding those standards, and drop the use of "best practices".
