Pdca

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Something needs to change: Something's wrong, and needs to be fixed, and you've worked hard to create a credible vision of where you want it to be in future. But are you 100% sure that you're right? And are you absolutely certain that your solution will work perfectly, in every way?

Where the consequences of getting things wrong are significant, it often makes sense to run a well-crafted pilot project. That way if the pilot doesn't deliver the results you expected, you get the chance to fix and improve things before you fully commit your reputation and resources.

So how do you make sure that you get this right, not just this time but every time? The solution is to have a process that you follow when you need to make a change or solve a problem; A process that will ensure you plan, test and incorporate feedback before you commit to implementation.

A popular tool for doing just this is the Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle. This is often referred to as the Deming Cycle or the Deming Wheel after its proponent, W Edwards Deming. It is also sometimes called the Shewhart Cycle.

Deming is best known as a pioneer of the quality management approach and for introducing statistical process control techniques for manufacturing to the Japanese, who used them with great success. He believed that a key source of production quality lay in having clearly defined, repeatable processes. And so the PDCA Cycle as an approach to change and problem solving is very much at the heart of Deming's quality-driven philosophy.

The four phases in the Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle involve:

1. Plan: Identifying and analyzing the problem. 2. Do: Developing and testing a potential solution. 3. Check: Measuring how effective the test solution was, and analyzing whether it could be improved in any way. 4. Act: Implementing the improved solution fully.
These are shown in Figure 1 below.

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There can be any number of iterations of the