Best Practices Best Practices

Best practices describe those methods of working that a Community Of Practice has found to have the most benefits and perhaps the best cost/benefit relationship.

They may include the use of specific tools known for their highest performance.

They may require a great deal of skill and/or training on the part of the practitioner.

Choosing Best Practices from among competing methods may be done with Bench Marking.

The CM Professionals community of practice is identifying areas for research on CM Best Practices, and have created a Design Pattern Template for use in reporting Best Practices.

Arranged in process order from the start of a content management project to conclusion, they are:

Getting Stakeholder Support
Making the Business Case?
Assembling the Project Team?
Content Audit
Alignment of Content Strategy to Business Strategy?
Controlled Vocabulary
Categorization
Information Structure?
Design for Reuse
Search?
Navigation
VisualDesign?
Use Case and Scenario
Training? a Contributor?
ChangeManagement?
Content Conversion?
Content Migration?
Metadata Tagging?
Roles-based Workflow
ProofOfConcept?
Scalability?
Deployment?
Content Life Cycle
Multichannel Publishing
Performance? Metrics?

There is no single "best practice" because best is not best for everyone. Every organization is different in some way--different missions, cultures, environments, and technologies. What is meant by "best" are those practices that have been shown to produce superior results; selected by a systematic process; and judged as exemplary, good, or successfully demonstrated. Best practices are then adapted to fit a particular organization.

American Productivity and Quality Center

Methods of performing a process or sub-process that have been identified inside or outside of the organization and which are validated, codified, diffused, and shared with others to encourage reciprocity and knowledge sharing.

U. Berkeley

The processes, practices, and systems identified in public and private organizations that performed exceptionally well and are widely recognized as improving an organization's performance and efficiency in specific areas. Successfully identifying and applying best practices can reduce business expenses and improve organizational efficiency.

General Accounting Office

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