A project is an organized method for reaching specific goals and planned benefits within a target schedule and defined budget. Project management methodology provides an organization with powerful tools that improve its ability to plan, implement, and control its activities. Up to recent times organizations considered project management processes as an optional tool for planning and implementing business activities.

But today this mentality has changed drastically and organizations believe Project Management methodology as something mandatory to maintain the competitiveness of the firm. The number of projects is increasing rapidly and they manage most of their activities through projects. Therefore project management has become an integral tool of an organization.

The goal of an organization that uses PM methodology is to achieve excellence in project management. Excellence can be defined as the ability to complete projects successfully and continuously. Excellence in project management is achieved through best practices. The use of best practices ensures ability to deliver projects predictably, constantly, and successfully. Therefore identifying best practices and improving them continuously is an important exercise for any organization that aspires to achieve excellence in PM.

'Good practice' means there is general agreement that the correct application of these skills, tools, and techniques can enhance the chances of success over a wide range of different projects, in other words, something that works well on a repetitive basis or something that leads to a competitive advantage. Best practices can be in the form of templates, guidelines, procedures, policies, or processes which everybody has agreed to follow. Lessons learned documented by the project team throughout the life cycle can be a source of best practice for an organization. Best practices are very dynamic; they are reviewed, updated or removed over time.

This is known as continuous improvement. For example conducting continuous project management training in the organization, or establishing a formal change control system with defined change control procedure can be best practices of an organization. The best practices are made up of capabilities. Capability is a specific competency that can be sued to implement projects. Each best practice should have its associated capabilities that help to perform the best practice. Organizations can have their own best practices or they can be industry standards. The best practices can be at different levels; Professional Standards,,Industry Specific,. Company Specific, Project Specific ,and Individual level
Listed below are some best practices organizations use to maintain high performance in projects.

• All the organizational decisions are made considering the interest of the stakeholders
• Organization ensures all the projects are strategically aligned
• Organization follows a standard set of project management processes and procedures
• Formal performance management system is used to manage the performance of all involved in the project
• The organization uses a process to select and prioritized projects
• The organization uses risk management processes to asses and control risks
• The organization has a process for capturing, storing and sharing lessons learned" The organization uses benchmarking techniques to improve project performance
• Programme management processes and standards are established
• Portfolio management processes and standards are established The org continuously takes steps to develop project managers
• Training plans for all levels of project employees are established and implementeds
• Project management processes are integrated with all the other processes in the organization
• The org measures project effectiveness using project delivery methods

It is mandatory for organizations that use project management methodology to have a best practice process to discover, evaluate, classify and store best practices in a best practice library so that they can be used for effective project management and continuous improvement.