Best Practices Problem Avoidance (#53)
/In this podcast episode, we talk about the various techniques that can be employed to improve your odds of installing best practices. Key points made are:
Determine who manages the process to be changed. Could be trouble if you are impacting the area of responsibility of another manager. If so, try some other best practice.
You may not be in the right; review the issues of other parties to see if their concerns about a best practice are valid.
If you have not installed a best practice before, obtain lots of advice before proceeding.
Space out installations, so that the department has a chance to settle down in between major changes.
Slice up large projects into smaller pieces, so that some items can go live sooner. Improves the odds of overall success.
In-house capacity impacts your ability to complete installs; need to free up staff time.
Each successive project frees up more staff time, making it easier to work on the next project.
Review projects for dependencies, and verify in advance that you can work through them.
Verify that a new best practice integrates into the corporate system of controls.
Stick with off-the-shelf software; it rarely makes sense to develop a customized solution.
Maintain a full list of best practices to work on, so that you can easily switch over if there is a problem with the current project.
Chat with other managers periodically to see if any of them are interested in a best practice.