Knowledge Base · Solutions
What does a PDCA cycle look like in practice?
The book's example: a team plans to cut order errors 25% with a checklist, runs the trial for two weeks, checks and finds a 15% cut plus one confusing section, then acts by fixing that section and testing again. Plan states a hypothesis with a number, Do tries it small, Check tells the truth, Act standardises or adjusts.
Chapter 4 of the book teaches PDCA with a worked example small enough to copy. A team believes a simple checklist for its order entry process will cut errors by 25%. That belief, written down with a number attached, is the Plan: Sarah will create the checklist by Friday, the team starts using it Monday, and the error rate is tracked for two weeks.
Do is the trial, run at a modest scale: the team uses the new checklist for all orders. Note that they are testing, not rolling out. Nothing has been declared the new way yet, which keeps the cost of being wrong low.
Check is the step the book says most people skip, and it demands honesty. After two weeks the data shows errors down 15%, not the hoped-for 25%, and the team reports one section of the checklist is confusing. A partial success plus a specific complaint is a good Check outcome. Pretending the target was met would have wasted it.
Act follows from what was learned: the team adjusts. They rewrite the confusing section and run the test another two weeks with a 20% reduction as the goal. Had the original target been met, Act would instead have meant standardising the checklist as the normal way of working. The book's verdict on the whole loop: it is an exercise in humility that turns a miss into learning instead of blame.
Related questions
- What is the PDCA cycle, and how do I run one?
- DMAIC or PDCA: which cycle should I use?
- How do I run a small improvement experiment this week?
Source: Continuous Improvement in the Workplace, Ch. 4 (Solution Creation and Implementation).