Plan Do Check Act
Another classic tool for your toolkit. This is a simple but powerful tool to improve your process, product or service.
What is it?
Tool for process improvement. It is used to identify a change, implement it, check the results and act on the results.
It was developed by Dr William Edwards Deming and Walter Shewhart. It was known as PDSA (Plan- Do- Study- Act) and evolved to PDCA. The difference is quite nuanced. Study tep for Deming is on studying the results and verifying them against the theory and developing new knowledge.
Whilst the Check step, is more about checking whether the implementation of the change was successful or not and what changes need to be done*.
This article will go through the steps of the PDCA framework.
Why use it?
It’s a process for continuously improving a product, process or service. It is a slower process and allows for a more methodical approach. It’s about incremental improvement and not for a radical change.
It allows you to test ideas and solve problems at a small scale and not impact your whole population (for example your customer base).
Plan
In this step, write down your problem statement or opportunity. Research and review the available information. This will allow you to do analysis to understand the problem or opportunity in depth. You can run brainstorming sessions to generate ideas.
Once you have that information, create a plan and identify your key performance indicators that you can measure and track.
Do
Take action to implement the plan. Use a small-scale project or proof of concept so you can see whether it works or not on a small subset of the population. This will protect your population from disruption and only affect a smaller group if things don’t go well.
Check
Review and analyse the results against your key performance indicators. This allows you to assess whether it worked, didn’t work, or more information is required.
This is usually an iterative process where you would loop between the Do and Check steps until you get the definitive answer.
If it is not working, you may have to go back to Step 1 - Plan.
Act
If your small scale project or proof of concept works, you can implement your solution across the whole population.
Or if it was not successful, you can go back to step 1 and replan and continue through the following steps of the framework.
As you can see the framework is not sequential but iterative and you may jump to different steps in the process depending on the results of the action.
Try It
Try this in your project and let me know how you went. Choose a current process within the project that you can test it on. Take your project team on the journey.
https://deming.org/explore/pdsa/