Tool 21

Deming's pdsa cycle (the shewhart cycle)

What the tool is

W. Edwards Deming (an American colleague of Kaoru Ishikawa – see Tool 20) believed that, through careful measurement and analysis of business processes, it should be possible to determine why products deviate from customers’ requirements. He produced a rather simplified feedback loop designed to help managers to identify and modify the parts of a process that need to be improved – the PDSA cycle. PDSA stands for plan, do, study, act.

There is nothing very magical about the model – it is a commonsense approach to continual improvement and the real power comes not from using ...

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