PDCA (plan, do, check, act)
A four-step iterative process used for continuous improvement in business and management. Also known as the Deming cycle. The steps are:
- Plan an experiment (based on a hypothesis)
- Do or conduct the experiment
- Check or study the results or outcome of the experiment
- Act on the results, changing either the hypothesis or the system accordingly, sharing appropriately
PDCA
If this sounds like Scrum, or Kanban, or the build-measure-learn loop from Lean Startup to you, that's not a coincidence. In the Toyota Production System, Deming called this the Shewhart cycle, which may be better known by its steps of plan-do-check-act (PDCA).
In plan, you establish the goal or the target and a plan to achieve it. You execute the plan in the do step. Then, you "check" the actual results. I prefer Deming's use of the word "study" for this step. Last, you "act" on your findings. If you like the outcome, you make it a part of the standard operating procedure. If you don't, you use your findings to come up with the target for a new PDCA cycle.