Personalizing Best Practices is the New Practice

We are all familiar with the term "industry best practices". There are many of them in the market for all types of business needs.

For example, in the project management world, there's the PMI PMBOK Guidelines. There can be best practices on finance planning, HR employ performance improvements, or tuning a building into a lower cost green efficiency model.

Best Practices becoming Stale

The key word "industry" means that it's a practice that is well received as a good way of doing something. The problem with “industry best practices” is that they may be too complex or too limited for many applications.

'For example, the PMI PMBOK project management guidelines are very complete, yet some business group may find them too overwhelming. What happens (or should happen) is the best practice gets modified (expanded or simplified).

I have heard some people complain that this is doing disservice to the original best practice. I respectfully disagree. I think most all best practices may need some modification to help make it useable for certain business needs. I call this "personalizing best practices".

Making Best Practice Fresh

A personal best practice is taking something that works really well for the masses and then customizing it for our own enterprise's, department's, or group's needs.

The objective is to use the content to make something good happen. The objective is not to ensure we are all doing something that the industry in general say is good.

Another important point is that a personal best practice needs to be organic. This means it's alive and growing or constantly improving. This is really cool since we now have control over how things can get better over time.

It's hard to voice our opinion about improving an industry best practice. Try to do that with a best practice that is used by thousands (i.e., PMI PMBOK). With a personal best practice, we are keeping two things in focus.

One is that it is indeed the best way we feel we should do things today. Two is that since it's personal, we know that we can continuously improve it for our custom needs.

Pie is a great example of an enterprise online project management software that is made for personal best practices. The platform provides the tools to easily personalize any industry best practice. It also has the features to make continuous improvements fast and effortless.

Again, at the end of the day, it's all about driving value with any best practice. If it's personal, we can better focus on our value needs.

The next time someone in your organization investigates industry best practices, explain the power of turning an industry best practice into a personal solution that is more practical and actionable.

Written by Paul Dandurand, Pie CEO/Founder

Photo by Rob Lambert