PDCA cycle
Plan, Do, Check, Act. Runs an improvement as a turning wheel rather than a one-off task: each round starts from the result of the previous one.
Register nowWhen to use it?
- Trying a small change, measuring the result, then rolling it out.
- Recording whether a countermeasure actually worked.
- Tracking rounds in teams running continuous improvement.
Step by step
- 1Write the goal of the cycle at the top and press Start.
- 2Four phase boxes appear. Add your items in the field under each phase.
- 3Click the circle to the left of an item to mark it complete; it gets struck through.
- 4A project can hold several cycles; each goal becomes its own card.
Keyboard shortcuts (desktop)
Tips
- Put something measurable in the Check phase. If "did it improve?" has no number behind it, the cycle never closes.
- What comes out of the Act phase is the input to the Plan phase of the next cycle.
- Do not try to fill all four boxes at once; going in order is the method itself.
Worked example
Example: cutting first-response time in support
The support team currently replies in 14 hours on average. The target is 4. Before hiring anyone, they run a single cycle.
Plan
- Target: average first response under 4 hours
- Assumption: tickets pile up in the morning with nobody owning them
- Experiment: one person on duty from 09:00 to 11:00
- Duration: two weeks
Do
- Rota shared with the team
- The person on duty was given no other work in those two hours
- First-response time logged for every ticket
Check
- Average fell from 14 hours to 5
- Morning tickets fell to 2 hours
- Evening tickets did not change at all
- The person on duty fell behind on their own work
Act
- Morning duty made permanent
- Workload reduced on duty days
- New cycle opened for evening hours
One cycle cut the time to a third and produced the next question by itself: evening tickets. That is how PDCA is meant to run — each cycle hands you the subject of the next one.
Frequently asked questions
What is the PDCA cycle?
A four-step loop for continuous improvement: Plan, Do, Check, Act. Also known as the Deming cycle. The idea is to stop making one big change and instead run small experiments whose results you actually measure.
How long should one cycle be?
The shortest time in which you can measure the result. One to four weeks works for most office work. A six-month cycle is not a cycle: conditions will have shifted by the time you look, and you will not know what caused what.
What do you measure in the Check step?
Whatever you wrote in the Plan step. This is why the target has to be a number: "respond faster" cannot be checked, "average first response under 4 hours" can. Without a number written up front, Check turns into opinion.
What if the experiment fails?
A failed cycle is still a result and should not be thrown away. In the Act step you write down why the assumption did not hold, and the next cycle starts from that. The only real waste in PDCA is trying something new without recording what happened.
Is it free?
Yes. Klarsti is free and ad-free right now, and you do not need an account to run a PDCA cycle.