Throughout the USMBOK, 'Best Practice Statements' or BPS's are provided as additional guidance on areas where special attention will be required when considering the topic being discussed. The BPS's offered are not 'rules' or practices that must be followed, and instead are guidance to be considered and perhaps evolved further for use within your own service management system.

Best practices evolve and are managed to a 'practice lifecycle' similar to many other elements of a service management framework. The lifecycle suggested by the USMBOK has four main stages: common, best, good, next, described thus:

• Common - generally known and consistently defined, specific use undefined, accessible and in the 'public domain', yet unproven
• Best - generally recognized or at least proposed by the industry as being a reasonable and theoretically sound, unproven, an industry 'standard', minimum
• Good - transformed by use from theory to application, proven, statistical evidence of benefit as applied within a specific organization and scenarios, not transportable to another organization without a return to Best
• Next - Good practices that are stable, foundational, and candidates for innovative thinking and another cycle of improvement

The practice lifecycle supports the needs of a continuous improvement cycle and is easily integrated into a Lean Thinking, or similar quality management system.

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The practice lifecycle supports the needs of a continuous improvement cycle and is easily integrated into a Lean Thinking, or similar quality management system.