Quality Measures for Documentation of Best Practices

Research has identified a set of factors that may impact the success of implementing a best practice (BP). One such factor is to properly document the BP. Without a high quality documentation of BPs it might be difficult to understand and implement BPs within an organization. Therefore, we propose a set of quality measures (QMs) for BPs categorized in the form of a template, aimed at supporting the quality enhancement of documented BPs. The proposed template can be applied during the design of BPs in order to support the construction of high quality documentation of BPs, but can also be applied during the evaluation of already designed BPs. A tentative template was designed based on both a literature review and our own experiences in the area of Knowledge Management. We evaluated the tentative template by presenting it to practitioners and academic experts in the area of BP. Based on their evaluation we refined the model in an iterative approach, adjusting the QMs after each practitioners' and academic experts' input until we reached a final template. In this paper, we present the final template of QMs, and demonstrate its feasibility by applying it to existing BPs from a real-life organization. The research methodology applied was design science research.