Bill Ives points us to APQC's report on Facilitated Transfer of Best Practices. He highlights the main message of the report as
- Identify or create practices and processes to be transferred
- Document and validate the practices
- Share and communicate the best practices
- Create a clear adoption policy as to whether the best practices are voluntary or mandatory
- Measure and report results
Clearly, APQC puts a lot more thought into the concept of best practices with this report than the typical effort in this arena. As with any other large improvement effort, the organization needs to make it stick through a clear connection to the business needs.