You can further enhance the usage of checklists by including hyperlinks to boilerplate material or templates for any artifacts required to complete each item in the list. Since many PM’s often don’t know where to find such Best Practice materials (so end up creating their own and reinventing the wheel), this can often represent an additional step forward in productivity.

As with your caution about assessing metrics too soon, one should also allow the Best Practice material to initially be used as “voluntary” a starting point for PMs who are then free to modify them for their own needs. Only as maturity builds in the materials and PMs gain confidence that they are useful and relevant, should one start to enforce compliance to the material.