Most of my readers will already know the plan-do-check-act (pdCA) cycle popularized during the Total Quality movement that began in the late 1980s. Depending on your training and school of thought, pdCA as a concept was delivered to us by W. Edwards Deming (in my opinion, the thinker behind Total Quality) via Walter Shewhart, mathematician and arguably, the father of statistical quality control (seminal to all things Six Sigma). Whatever your pedigree or line of thought, the pdCA cycle is a centerpiece to continuous improvement.
Once you get beyond the concept and into practice, pdCA manifests in things like the daily meeting or huddle, basic problem solving that insists on checking for control, and even lean tactics like process confirmation. At that point, the structured pdCA cycle can take on a life of its own. Sometimes, we become aware that the structure stops delivering improvement. If that is the case for you, consider two ways to enhance your pdCA cycles to perhaps restore their luster.
First, shorten them
Shorter pdCA cycles improve your ability to detect problems closer to real-time. I have client teams who eschew daily meetings despite the rest of their organization meeting daily because it seems too much based on their team’s operation tempo. The first problem for these clients is myopia: they fail to see that their team is connected across a network of teams and that their disrhytmic cadence may cause problems to the rest of the organization. However, even if left unchecked, these teams will often come to the conclusion they have to meet more frequently: they have to shorten their pdCA cycle to get better results.
If your cycles are weekly, try daily. If daily, try to find points within the operational day that present opportunities for checking. Try shift start or mid-day to keep an eye on making 24-hour production targets. Using leaders’ standard work, you can also conduct short-cycle checks at various points in the day (a process confirmation).
The point is to shorten the cycle to improve your improvement.
Second, fortify the check
Shortening the cycle will improve your results, but another way to get improvement is to fortify the check in the cycle. By fortify, I mean strengthen it so it is causing more problem detection. If you are not steeped in continuous improvement thought, that last sentence may shock you, but remember that continuous improvement requires us to surface and solve process problems. If your pdCA cycle—more precisely, your check-in that cycle—isn’t producing more and better problems, you need to fortify it.
There are two powerful ways to fortify your checks. First, consider adding visuals that manage (detect and signal) process problems. A visual you can check that shows a process that is out of range or off-target is the point of recognition for a problem. If you aren’t checking these kinds of visuals in your pdCA cycles, add them. The second way to fortify your checks is with powerful questions. Powerful questions indisputably strike at the heart of whether a problem occurred. They ask about a target condition being met, a process that is performing unexpectedly, or whether a condition will be met before the next check.
Don’t forget the problem solving
You can shorten and fortify your checks, but if the surfaced problems aren’t moved to your problem-solving engine, the checks will drift from potentially transformational to mundanely transactional. Your team will get lulled into thinking the checks—daily or otherwise—are just boxes to be checked off. Take care to remember that improvement is a system with components. Don’t neglect to add pdCA to check the improvement system’s performance!
Remember that the system has operational and human aspects. If you are managing a team, bring positive leadership to bear on any pdCA cycle and watch your team go to town.