PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act), and its alternative PDSA (Plan, Do, Study, Act), are popular quality improvement frameworks. The truth is, they shouldn't always lead to improvement. If every single PDCA cycle you implement leads to improvement, I'd suggest you take a deeper look. Maybe you're not doing PDCA properly.
Briefly, PDCA is about the following 4 steps:
- P - Plan an improvement experiment. Plan how to test if this proposed improvement really brings about an improvement.
- D - Do the experiment.
- C - Check / Study the results of the experiment.
- A - Act on the results of the study. Implement the change or perform another cycle.
The 3rd step in PDCA, Check, requires you to check the results of what you did in the 'Do' step. The output of performing Check can result in one of the following conclusions:
- The proposed improvement works, let's implement it.
- The proposed improvement actually makes things worse, let's not implement it.
- The proposed improvement is not an improvement, or not enough of an improvement, let's not implement it.
The point of C (or S) is to serve as a control gate so we don't implement changes that are not worthwhile improvements.
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