Project Management: Foundations to Practice · Quality Management
Continuous Improvement
The Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle underlies much of modern quality thinking, including approaches teams apply without ever naming the framework explicitly.
The Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, often credited to Walter Shewhart and popularized by W. Edwards Deming, describes an iterative four-step approach to process improvement: plan a change, implement it on a small scale, check whether it produced the desired result, and act by either standardizing the change or adjusting the approach and repeating the cycle [1].
Key Takeaways
- PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) is an iterative cycle for testing and validating process improvements, credited to Shewhart and popularized by Deming.
- Testing changes at small scale before wide rollout limits the damage of a counterproductive change and makes it easier to detect and reverse.
- Six Sigma's DMAIC cycle reflects the same underlying logic of data-driven testing rather than assuming a change will simply work.
- Iterative or Agile teams effectively run many small PDCA cycles across a project's life, rather than one large cycle only at closure.