I've written a lot about "best practices", so I shouldn't have been surprised when someone asked me, "DO you always follow best practices?"

Honestly, I initially felt like a parent whose child had just asked them about youthful transgressions. It reminded me of when I've taught my kids all about knife safety. Even though they're not Boy Scouts like I was, I've given them their "Totin' Chips". Funny enough with such close views of my hands, none of them have failed to notice a scar on my left index finger and ask, "what's that from?" I then had to explain about a time that I definitely didn't follow knife safety and ended up with a lifelong reminder.If you've been around as long as I have, you remember that the ITIL v2 framework heavily used the term, "Best Practice". When ITIL v3 came along, all of a sudden we saw the term "Good Practice".

So what do a scar on my finger and ITIL changing from best to good have in common? Reality.

Best practices are a lofty goal for many organizations. ITIL has notably spawned many failed or abandoned projects. The very existence has been born out of experience of others who came before and found what they believed to be the best path. The fact is though that continuing experiences expand and modify some of those beliefs as new things are learned.

So what now? Should I pursue best practices if they are a moving target?

Yes. Keep trying, never give up striving to do things to the best of your ability and knowledge. I've heard people say like "best practices are for lazy people", or "best practices are unachievable", but at least they are a target. They key is to have a practice. There may be more than one good way to do something, so as long as you're consistent, then you're on the right track.

Remember, best practices are frameworks. Within each framework there are some hard and fast, foundational rules that should not be ignored. The rest of the framework is applied at the user's discretion.

If there're only 8 people in your IT org, how strict does change management need to be? It could be as simple as recording the event on a calendar and getting a peer review. No need for a large CAB meeting.

When it comes to coding in ServiceNow, you should never use current.update() in a before business rule, but if you incidentally include a static sys_id in a script, the world won't end. It's not awesome because of the transient nature of reference records, and it would definitely be preferable in a system property, but you're not going to cause a potentially endless loop of executing business rules.

So in short, stick to what you know to be good, and always be open to improvement.