Right-practice > Best-practice

A company’s "best-practice" does not have to be the best-practice for your company.  What you should work on is the “right-practice” for all times, “fast-practice” for most times and other companies' “best-practice” for almost never. 

Do not duplicate another company’s best-practice for 2 reasons:

1- Every company is unique and has its own characteristics that is why one size may not fits other companies even if it is really the best-practice.

2- It may not be the best-practice even for that company but they may launch it as if it is the best-practice (this is very critic since nobody runs down his goods especially if the practice already exists)

However, there is still room to benefit from the best-practices of other companies. A best-practice is only as good as its strength to minimize the problems in the field it is designed. If you are pretty sure about the details of the practice and think that it fits your "company’s dynamics" then you are about to find the right way to choose. The critical word here is “dynamics”. The most common mistake among professionals searching best-practice to apply is:

They compare today’s of companies in some aspects such as the sector, number of employees, the organizational structure etc. (just few of them include the management style which is a very right input)

None of the companies today are the carbon copies of their preceding years and none of them, for sure, will remain exactly the same for following years. Compaines change in time and they have to be so to survive.

While thinking about the adaptation of a company’s best-practice, professionals have to compare also the “possible future” of the companies. The dynamics will provide you with strong clues about the “right-practice” which might be derived from the “best-practice”.

A working clue on utilizing other company’s experiences:  Ask also for their bad-practices! 

Their bad-practices can give you clues while designing your “right-practice” because they usually involves “operational mistakes” during the process or the mistakes regarding to the “design” itself.

Finally, there may be a few “right-practices” for a given situation. Try to choose the most feasible one as your “fast-practice”. In other words, choose the "fast" one among the "right" ones. At the end of the day you will come up with such a result: Good fast-practices will widen the organization’s horizon regarding your future practices where you can design your company’s best-practice!