Shewhart's Cycle
My New Year’s resolution – to replace TV watching with book reading - is fraying. I was firm in January and February, but now I find myself increasingly enticed out of my reading chair. I spend more and more time standing in the doorway of our family room watching swatches of American Idol
or Dirty Jobs, pretending I’ll return to my book any minute.
What I’m reading, a rather dry book on management, doesn’t help. For instance, it includes a very long description of the “Shewhart Cycle.” I think I can describe this cycle in less than 100 words.
Shewhart’s Cycle says that if you want to continuously improve what you are doing you need to follow a loop of:
Planning out your objectives and how to reach them.
Doing what you planned to do.
Checking to see if doing your plan gets the results you wanted.
Acting on what you learned so you get even better results next time.
This cycle is often shortened to ‘Plan – Do – Check – Act” or PDCA.
This process is not brain surgery. Nonetheless, since the 1950s application of this cycle (and its permutations) has resulted in huge improvements in countless systems from manufacturing cars to distributing food aid.
EPA uses this cycle, both explicitly and implicitly, in many programs. However, I want to make sure we are using it at the highest, corporate, level. We now have tools in place to perform all four phases of the cycle agency-wide but they need to be improved and better connected in a lot of places.
This blog can be one small way to help us make better connections. Therefore, in the weeks ahead I will periodically revisit some of the initiatives I’ve discussed in previous entries and review how we are doing in improving our performance, regardless of whether it’s good, bad or ugly. In my next post I’ll close the loop on how we’ve done in fixing a problem regarding our enforcement workload. (Hint: it isn’t good.)
Shewhart’s Cycle is not a technique for self-flagellation. It’s a way to learn and get better. For instance, after reviewing my New Year’s resolution I changed my original plan. This weekend I picked up the latest Sue Grafton thriller. “N” is for “No more boring books.”
Boring books - i think i can agree on that only partly. Many of these books have great value if you use the knowledge in real life. TV is more passive medium to consume and it makes reader/user/consumer more lazy.
Posted by: Edgars Koronevskis | May 01, 2008 at 08:36 AM