Are your best practices out of date?

Best practices need to be reviewed and updated to stay best practices

3 min readFeb 28, 2020

Today’s ‘best practices’ lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried. Peter Thiel

The best practices we use today are built on historic environments, they are past practices that were previously successful.

As environments change, best practices should adapt and update. Best practices are not static, they evolve and improve to take advantage of new thinking, technology and environments.

Updating best practices is difficult because people have been successful using those best practices. People like to use familiar processes and in times of pressure will fall back on what they know.

This brings resistance to change. Even when best practices become less effective, it’s difficult to move on from them and embrace new best practices or a new approach.

Project methodology

Project methodologies offer an interesting example. Waterfall projects were the accepted way to deliver IT projects. Agile methodologies appeared and gained popularity until customers were demanding projects are Agile..

Old best practices linger on and Waterfall projects are still happening. Some people change and warn that Waterfall is dead (yet it lives it on)

Waterfall project management is dead

I see Agile is regularly pronounced dead (yet I keep working on Agile projects :-))

Agile software development is dead. Deal with it

Projects are a good example of past best practices being used. Individuals have had good, bad or indifferent experiences of Agile projects and this influences their choice of future projects. We should decide project methodology based on the project, people and the culture, not what was successful on previous projects with different circumstances.