Page 22 - Accounting Best Practices

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Why Best Practices Fail
a best practice and told to “go do it.” Under this scenario, they have only a
sketchy idea of what they are supposed to do, and so create a process that varies
in some key details from the baseline situation. To make matters worse, managers
at the new location may feel that they can create a better best practice from the
start, and so create something that differs in key respects from the baseline. For
both reasons, the incidence of best practice duplication failure is high.
To avoid these problems, a company should first be certain that it has accu-
mulated all possible knowledge about a functioning best practice—the forms,
policies, procedures, equipment, and special knowledge required to make it work
properly—and then transfer this information into a concise document that can be
shared with new locations. Second, a roving team of expert users must be com-
missioned to visit all new company locations and personally install the new sys-
tems, thereby ensuring that the proper level of experience with a best practice is
brought to bear on a duplication activity. Finally, a company should transfer the
practitioners of best practices to new locations on a semipermanent basis to
ensure that the necessary knowledge required to make a best practice effective
over the long term remains on-site. By taking these steps, a company can increase
its odds of spreading best practices throughout all of its locations.
A special issue is the tendency of a new company location to attempt to
enhance a copied best practice at the earliest opportunity. This tendency fre-
quently arises from the belief that one can always improve upon something that
was created elsewhere. However, these changes may negatively impact other
parts of the company’s systems, resulting in an overall reduction in performance.
Consequently, it is better to insist that new locations duplicate a best practice in
all respects and use it to match the performance levels of the baseline location
before they are allowed to make any changes to it. By doing so, the new location
must take the time to fully utilize the best practice and learn its intricacies before
they can modify it.

WHY BEST PRACTICES FAIL

There is a lengthy list of reasons why a best practice installation may not suc-
ceed, as noted in the following bullet points. The various reasons for failure can
be grouped into a relatively small cluster of primary reasons. The first is lack of
planning, which can include inadequate budgeting for time, money, or personnel.
Another is the lack of cooperation by other entities, such as the programming
staff or other departments that will be impacted by any changes. The final, and
most important, problem is that there is little or no effort made to prepare the
organization for change. This last item tends to build up over time as more and
more best practices are implemented, eventually resulting in the total resistance
by the organization to any further change. At its root, this problem involves a fun-
damental lack of communication, especially to those people who are most
impacted by change. When a single implementation is completed without