Why?

Why invent the wheel again? Incorporating what others have learned is an important practice.

How?

Depending on your topic many best, good and bad practices may be available.

Ingredients

• A willingness to investigate what others have done.
• A sense of scope: which reported practices are important to you, which are not.
• A critical sense of success factors: do the ones identified by others really apply to you?

In practice

Internally good practices tend to be repeated, but few companies have processes to identify and incorporate best practices described by others. There is a real opportunity to improve here.