Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle of Decision-Making

Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle of Decision-Making

There are a number of tools and techniques used to make sound business decisions that will help to resolve a particular problem or area that needs improvement. There is not one correct tool or technique to be used for each problem faced and not all are appropriate for all problems. He or she should examine the available tools and techniques and apply one or more than one that will help to resolve the problem faced. One of those tools and techniques is the "Plan-Do-Check-Act" or PDCA cycle. The PDCA cycle is made up of four stages, Plan, Do, Check, and Act that are progressed in order and are dependent on each stages success.

History

"The PDCA Cycle was originally developed by Walter Shewhart, the pioneering statistician who developed statistical process control in the Bell Laboratories in the US during the 1930's. It is often referred to as the "Shewhart Cycle". It was taken up and promoted very effectively from the 1950s on by the famous Quality Management authority, W. Edwards Deming, and is consequently known by many as the "Deming Wheel". (2006) The PDCA cycle is used to make continuous improvements to a particular process or problem. (2006) Each stage of the cycle can be repeated again with each stage applying a new resolution to the overall problem that will eventually end up with the overall solution.

Stages

The first stage of the PDCA cycle is called the Plan stage. During the plan stage a problem is identified or an opportunity is identified for improvement. (2006) This stage is better referred to as the analysis stage. During this stage information gathering occurs and a potential solution is theorized. This stage will devise a plan to resolve the problem or opportunity for improvement to be applied in the next stage.

The second stage of the PDCA cycle is called the Do stage. The Do stage is designed to solve the problem on a small or experimental scale first. This is necessary in order to minimize the effects of the resolution so not to cause an impact on if the plan shall fail. For example, applying a patch to a server would on affect the one server instead of applying the patch to all servers.

The third stage is called the Check stage. The Check stage is used to check or certify the plan is achieving the desired results. If this stage of the PDCA cycle fails, then the cycle moves to the Plan stage to introduce a new idea. If the desired results are achieved, he or she may continue the next stage.

The fourth and final stage of the PDCA cycle is called the Act stage. If the preceding stages are successful, a change is then applied on a larger scale. This stage may require others to be involved in order to scale out the changes to other departments. Once this stage is successful, he or she may continue to the Plan stage once again to work at improving the problem being addressed. The entire PDCA cycle process may be used again to resolve a problem or improve on a process.

Example

A good example of a problem he or she could use the PDCA cycle to resolve would be a performance issue that involved multiple systems. For example, a company runs a number of Terminal Servers with Citrix Presentation Server also installed on each server to provide load balancing of the servers. An issue has been identified affecting performance of one of the applications available in the Citrix farm (A Citrix farm is a group of load balanced Windows Terminal Servers that provide applications to many individuals (2006)). The first step is to identify the issue, what may or may not be causing the issue and a plan to resolve it.

Once a plan of attack is identified, the Plan stage, the next step would be to apply the plan to one of the Citrix servers. This stage is referred to as the Do stage. By applying the plan to just one of the Citrix servers allows the plan to be terminated if need be because only one