Can I Offer You Some Feedback? - Episode #101

Show Notes:

In this week’s Business Bite, Sara discusses the PDSA cycle – a powerful method for continuous improvement and problem-solving. Discover how this framework, developed by Dr. Walter Schuhart, can transform your business processes. Subscribe for new weekly episodes!

Below we are offering a transcript of the podcast for accessibility and reference.

Episode #101: Business Bites: PDSA CYCLE

Welcome to Business Bites. My name is Sara. This is the podcast for busy professionals who want the quick hits of business terminology, historical context, and strategies for integration. Today we're talking about the PDSA Cycle, which is a method for continuous improvement and problem solving. You may have heard of the PDCA Cycle, which is similar but has a specific nuance.

So PDSA stands for Plan, Do, Study, Act. Again, you may be familiar with the model that is Plan, Do, Check, Act, but we're going to be talking about this one that has study in it. This is a framework for systematic improvements that involves planning the change, implementing it, studying the results, and acting on what has been learned to make future improvements. The reason I'm choosing this one over PDCA is PDCA is great when we have a very well-refined system and we're just checking our work. In a sense, we already know what to do and we're checking, again, instead of study.

Study enables us to think about the process more overall, really get into what exactly is happening in that situation. And how do we think about making things better? We may not know enough information to be able to check yet, which is why we take the time to study. But again, we would plan, we do, we study, and then we act.

Now, this step-by-step method was developed by Dr. Walter Schuhart and then later expanded on by Dr. Edward Deming. This cycle is rooted in quality control and management practices and became much more popular in the 20th century for driving continuous improvement in various fields.

So, let's look at an example. Perhaps you're looking to do an improvement in your customer service process. For Plan, you would identify a customer service issue and develop a new procedure to address it. Do: You would take the time to implement the new procedure on a small scale. Study: You would analyze feedback and performance data to assess the impact. Act: You make adjustments based on the findings and roll out the improved procedure more broadly. Again, these are smaller steps that we're making incremental change in order to improve the process.

Let's look at another example. Perhaps you're looking at a marketing campaign and you want to make it more effective. Our Plan: We design a new marketing strategy and set objectives for it. The Do: We launch the campaign to our test audience and see how they respond. Study: We measure the campaign's effectiveness through metrics like engagement conversions, and click-throughs. And then Act: We refine the strategy based on a number of results and then launch it to a larger audience. Again, whether the example is thinking about our customer service improvement or the campaign, we're making incremental steps and iterating again, repeating the process in order to improve it.

Now, if you want to get started with the PDSA cycle, this is about starting small. Begin with a small-scale implementation to test your changes. One of the challenges when we talk about changing or improving processes is we change too many things at once. We identify three or four things that we'd like to change and do them all at once. So we don't actually know which is the one that made the difference. Again, picking one thing to test your changes allows you to make adjustments before doing a full rollout.

Step two would be, gather and analyze data. Now that you've made this change, collect any relevant data to evaluate the effectiveness. Did this change make a difference? Did it move the needle for you or did it get anything different done? This data helps you make more informed decisions during the study phase and then you can go back to coming up with a new plan going forward.

This has been Sara with Business Bites. You can reach me at podcast@mod.network. We would love to hear from you and what other terminology you'd like bite-sized. As always, give us a quick rating on your platform of choice and share this podcast with a friend. We'll see you next time.