PDCA or PDSA (Plan – Do – Check – Adjust or Act and Plan – Do – Study – Adjust or Act) ?

• Does it matter which you use?
  • It depends (like everything). It is dependent on who your audience is and what you are trying to achieve.

• Who is your audience?
  • Where are they at?
  • What are you trying to communicate?
  • What is their operational definition of the word(s) you use?
    • Is it the same as yours, is it different?
  • Will they ever interact with a person who learned a different acronym and be able to communicate effectively?
    • I’ve had people look at me like I am crazy when I’ve said PDSA and think I obviously didn’t know what lean was because they learned it as PDCA.
    • I’ve also had people say “you really get it as you have advanced to using ‘Study’ instead of ‘Check’.”

• And what are you trying to achieve?
  • For simplicity I’m going to assume it is the disciplined use of the scientific method for learning, improving, and problem solving.
  • But you could have completely different objectives. If so, then how you decide to use language should be different.

Plan and Do seem to have avoided any controversy or concern. Maybe because they are simple concepts or used so frequently they are well understood? But that doesn’t seem to be the case for Study/ Check or Adjust/Act.

I’m not going to lose sleep over Study or Check or over Adjust or Act, but will be concerned about how the audience interprets and understands these words and as a result the behavior it drives.

Study or Check?

These days I personally prefer Study, though I have used Check plenty in the past and still do. It is all very dependent on the audience. The key is whether the intent of the word is effectively communicated. The intention is after planning and doing to look at what happened (in comparison to your hypothesis) and understand what actually happened and why. Is that effectively understood by the audience? What behavior do the following definitions drive (1st listed at dictionary.com)?

Adjust or Act?