CoPr: Core Practice

"Best practice is a substitute for knowledge" Krag Brotby

Simple: a checklist of the minimum things every business needs to do, and how to do them with the least fuss: the copper answer not the gold one.

Free: contributed by the public, and returned to the public for free. It is distributed online at this website, or you can download it as a book. Really. No strings, no spam, no catch.

What is Core Practice?

Core Practice is an innovative new concept: the strategic decision to minimise cost in part of the enterprise by implementing practices sufficient to (a) meet obligations and (b) to make processes work to a standard sufficient that risk (to the organisation and to people in its care) is reduced to some acceptable level.
Core Practice is documented business guidance on the core practices, which is user contributed and free. We aim for a million users.
Core Practice is an international organisation of people to promote the concept and maintain the guidance.
Core Practice is a website for the organisation and the guidance.
Core Practice is an ideological movement to make Core Practice a respectable alternative to Best Practice (the copper answer not the gold one), and to bring core practices into the public domain.

Take another look at the definition of Core Practice:

Core Practice: the strategic decision to minimise cost in a discipline of the enterprise by implementing practices sufficient to (a) meet obligations and (b) to make processes work to a standard sufficient that risk (to the organisation and to people in its care) is reduced to some acceptable level.

Core Practice is just enough to make the Processes work and not put anyone (or the business) at unacceptable risk.  We think that is a sensible and intelligent level for a business to aim for in non-critical areas of the business.  We think there is too much emphasis on aiming for best practice in all areas: it is wasteful, distracting and a drag on the business.

You are free to give them a copy of CoPr, so long as you follow the rules of the license (handing them an unchanged copy of CoPr is definitely within the terms of the license).

You will want to learn as much as you can about CoPr so you can give them some good advice on how to approach using it.

You may like to get trained and/or certified by the IoCP to give your clients assurance about using your advice.

Small businesses "change gear" when:

• you survive that first wild year and you can start plugging the leaks and baling out and try to get things stabilised
• you reach a point where slogging on doing what you are doing is not attractive so you lift your game: scale things up and tighten things up and get some real money coming in
• you reach a point where slogging on doing what you are doing is not attractive so you tidy things up and tighten things up ready to sell it
• you reach a nice stable state and you want to level them out and coast home to retirement

Only (1) what you can afford and (2) what benefits your business.

You only have so much time and money to devote to planning and managing the business.  We think all these Practices are essential but that doesn't mean you will ever get to all of them.  Every small business is winging it in some area (so are many much larger businesses).  Hopefully by this point you have a list of Practices you ought to be looking at.  With luck we have even given you some guidance on where to start and/or what order to do them in.

Doing it "by the bo

You need to get a bare minimum set of practices in place as quick as you can to ensure the initial functioning of the business and get you through that all important first year. 

Start with Maturity Level 0:Beginning practices.  Try to get all the Level 0 practices in place, then start on Level 1:Controlled practices.  Within those practices start with Optimising Model: Plan practices.