Should package management be upgrade first?

I seem to recall at some point in my past reading advice that yum and RPM be upgraded prior to upgrading other software, but I haven't been able to find anything current on the topic. Is this still best practice? If I do upgrade those packages prior to doing a full system upgrade, should one be upgrade prior to the other? I ask because I'm working on an ansible playbook to handle system updates.rhel

Thanks,
Jameson