Best practices. For many, a four letter word followed by "change." Recently, best practices got full press with standard-compliant HTML and CSS webpages. Presto chango, a one click validator later, and best practices became the norm. Anyone trying to debug an AJAX widget can tell you, the best practices described by the W3C just works. Unfortunately, the same diligence is often ignored in areas outside of HTML, which is a big shame. Best practices evolve, and all areas of a business need to be actively assessing their own procedures for optimization. Best practices, from human resources to software development, need to be analyzed and implemented correctly. Partially adopting best practices in some areas while ignoring others can lead to the depreciation of whatever value was gained, or worse, an overall detriment to efficiency.
An example of this happening every day is a concept so beleaguered it can now be called mainstream: Agile development. For those outside of a development team, Agile development is the process of rapid prototyping and integration, without the formal project life-cycle typified by other project management methodologies. The benefits of this are immense; constant integration streamlines dependency and integration issues that are often underestimated, and result in a project timeline grinding to a halt. Rapid prototyping leads to problem-focused development. However, many times a project comes off the rails by ignoring best practices in favour of the rapid on nature of Agile development. This is a huge mistake.
Agile development, when used responsibly, can be an incredible boon to a team's productivity. To see this happen however, all of the best practices related to Agile development must be used. Rapid prototyping is excellent, but you have to follow it with frequent end user review (doubly important in an Agile project because more upfront formal sign-off may be ignored to get to the prototype). Every member of the team must understand why best practices are important to follow.
"How we do it here" is a common notion at a company. It's inevitable, and every company will have its own particular flavour. However, this is no excuse to deviate from the best practices established in particular fields. After-all, there's no cheaper way to get rid of kinks in process than to build on the distilled knowledge of other professionals in the same situation as you!
This best analogy (as always) comes to us from cars. Hooking up all sorts of improvements to a '92 Dodge Colt will never make it a showstopper. The same incremental improvements, when combined with a piece of great engineering, results in a Enzo Ferrari. Not to put down the mighty Colt, but I want every one of my projects to be of the "supercar" variety.
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