Plan, Do, Check, Act – The PDCA cycle of improvement

The Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Cycle

The PDCA cycle is a four step model used to iteratively improve processes and products in a controlled way, with a clear focus on quality throughout the continuous improvement cycle.

The four steps of the model are as follow:

1. Plan

The first things you need to do is to identify / prioritize an opportunity for improvement, something to focus on. You might do this through conversations with team-members as part of our huddle, or thorugh suggestion boxes or other ways. Once you’ve identified opportunities, you should prioritize them, potentially using something simple like an ease/benefit matrix to help you choose which of your opportunities to focus on.

Once you’ve chosen an opportunity, the next thing to do is to set some objecrives in relation to it. What exactly are you trying to do with this improvement or set of changes?

Lastly, in this phase, once you know what you’re working on and why you’re working on it, it’s time to create a detailed plan that outlines the steps needed to reach the objectives. This should include defining resources, setting timelines, establishing metrics for success and allocating owners and governance processes for the work you’re going to do, even if these are pretty light-touch.

2. Do

Next up, you’ve guessed it. It’s time to actually implement the plan to make improvement. Potentially test your improvement on a small part of your process / population (a pilot) to see how it’s working.

As you’re implementing your changes, it’s important to gather some data on how it’s all going so that you monitor success and capture any issues or exceptions. These are all helpful data points that can support further improvements later in the lifecycle of continuous improvement.

3. Check

Once you’ve implemented your plan and gathered the data associated with the new and improved process you’ve implemented, it’s time to do some analysis. What is the data telling you? How does it align with your objectives and expecations? Where are there differences? What other opportunities might this pose? Are you achieving your goals?

4. Act

Ok – so now that you’ve reviewed your data and gathered the insights you have on the pilot improvement you’ve made, you have a few things you can do, all of which involve acting.

At this stage, if you’ve run a successful pilot, the next act is to fully implement the solution across the wider population that it could relate to. This could be a gradual process if necessary.

Alternatively, if the plan hasn’t yielded the results you were hoping for, you can basically start again. You can re-analyse the context and the process you’re exploring and come up with a new plan of action to improve it, if it remains a priority. You can then go through the PDCA cycle again, aiming for improvements and to achieve your objectives.

Whatever you end up doing at this stage, it’s worth documenting and reflecting on your lessons learned, so that you can apply your learnings to new opportunities.

We don’t do too much on this side of business, but we do consider an approach to problem solving that might be interesting, as well as the innovator’s dilemma. The Eisenhower matrix might also be a useful tool for helping to decide what you could focus on improving.

Our podcast on continuous improvement might also be of interest:

The Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle is not something we’ve actually used, but it has a good reputation and seems fairly intuitive. It also appears to be useful across a wide range of contexts, functions and industries, in part because it is such a high level model. We do like the fact that it is data driven and that it involves individuals at the “coal face”, as it were.

That said, when we’re considering this type of work,  we can’t help but think of the scientific method. We like to think of our plan as an “hypothesis” that we then “test” in an “experiment” that we can learn through and continue to improve as a result of.

Regardless of how you go about it, continued marginal improvement and the proceduralization of work / focus on processes and their improvement, can have a big positive impact on the overall performance of an organization.

Deming, W. E. (1986). Out of the Crisis. MIT Press.

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