Most everyone is familiar with the PDCA cycle - Plan, Do, Check, Act. Not as many, myself included, are familiar with the PDSA cycle - Plan, Do, Study, Act. PDCA is often associated with quality, quality and total quality management. The father of PDCA is frequently noted as W. Edwards Deming. What I didn't know is that PDCA was actually a derivative of the PDSA cycle from a presentation that Deming did in 1950. For some reason Japanese executives revised and recast the PDSA cycle as PDCA. It went relatively undiscussed by Deming until the 1980's and 1990's when he was blunt in noting they are not the same thing and that he never supported the PDCA cycle. The PDSA cycle is briefly described below:
Plan - develop the objective, determine questions to be answered and predictions of outcome and make a plan to carry out a full cycle.
Do - make the plan happen, document results including problems and unexpected results and begin analysis.
Study - complete analysis, compare results to predictions and summarize what was learned.
Act - determine what changes need to be made and decide if another cycle should take place.
To see the references for this article and get the full details on the Deming PDSA cycle, check out this journal article.
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