Is there a way to ensure that Best Practices are identified for re-use at the beginning of a project? Not to mention following through with this idea across the entire length of a projects life?

We all know that in medium / large IT organizations there are a lot of changes made to the project delivery approach depending  on a variety of factors ( new environment, client request, new ideas, crunched timelines, etc ).  Invariably during the course of this change people stumble across newer and more efficient ways of doing work that deliver higher value.

So the question really is how do we capture these best practices and make them readily available to the next set of people trying to start a new project?

This is a great way of creating a process that allows new project members to bring themselves up to speed with the current project.

What is also important to understand is that capturing best practices alone, while effective, is not the best way to ensure the value spreading through your organization. Capturing critical resource information is just as important, which means once you've identified a resource you can update your best practices records to indicate who the "go-to" person for an identified best practice or lesson learnt is. This will start dialogue between people and drive knowledge sharing.

Over time you will see a steady shift as more and more people start using this as a platform to do a quick "read" before getting started with a project.

Stumbling Blocks:

You need to figure out creative ways of getting project members to translate the experiences they have gained into best practices. There is an effort to this, however you need to judge whether this investment in time is justified in the long run for your organization.

Benefits  of doing it correctly:

This will enable to achieve detailed task in projects faster, and also ensure quality in those tasks, as it reduces rework effort, and brings in consistency in work across different members.