review-best-practice-fit
Review Best Practice Fit
Evaluate an existing solution against applicable best practices, identify gaps, and produce a prioritized fix list.
Why This Is Best Practice
Adopted by: McKinsey and BCG use structured as-is/to-be gap analysis before every engagement to identify which best practices a client's current approach violates — it is the primary tool for diagnosing why organizations underperform their industry peers. Google's Engineering Practices mandate design reviews against explicit quality criteria before large features ship. ISO 9001 certification requires formal gap audits comparing current processes against the standard before submission. Impact: Google's structured design review process reduces post-ship defects by ~50% and catches architecture problems that survive code review (Google Engineering Practices documentation). ISO 9001 mandates formal gap audits before certification precisely because self-assessment consistently misses systemic gaps — organizations routinely discover critical non-conformances only during external audits that internal reviews missed (ISO 9001:2015 §9.2 internal audit requirements). McKinsey's structured gap analysis prevents clients from investing in solutions that miss the dimensions that actually drive performance — the most expensive mistake in strategy. Why best: Self-assessment without an external standard is systematically optimistic — practitioners overweight what they did and underweight what they omitted. A structured comparison against explicit best-practice criteria catches omissions (the invisible gaps), not just flaws (the visible ones). Ad-hoc feedback ("this looks good, but maybe add X") is alternative — it finds surface problems only and produces no prioritized action plan.
Sources: Google Engineering Practices; ISO 9001:2015 §9.2 internal audit requirements; McKinsey Problem Solving methodology