In the race to get to 'faster, better, and cheaper', a frequently traveled path is for teams to identify, codify, adopt, and often adapt 'best practices' to use in performing their work.

The word practice is defined as 'a habitual or customary action or way of doing something'. In this same source, the definition of best establishes a high bar for the concept: 'surpassing all others in excellence, achievement, or quality.

It is easy to consider these words in combination as thus implying that there is an obligation for a team to find the best ''possible'' way, but this is usually not what is meant by the phrase. Instead, a 'best practice' is simply a way of indicating that a team is striving to consistently use approaches which they consider to be the best of those that are known, appropriate, and implementable in a given situation.

But there is an even greater concern about best practices: