Adapt and Adopt: An Experiment in Making Best Practices Adequate in an Organization

So called best practices promise many advantages to organizations that adopt them. Reusing these practices, however, requires their adaptation to the specific context of each organization. This adaptation means that for a specific organization, the practices cannot be best. They can, at the most, be good or widely used, but not best. We briefly show this problem by describing a project at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) where it was necessary to adapt the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) set of practices to the IFRC organizational culture.