Improving Anything (or Think Like a WHALE)

For anyone interested in process improvement for either personal or professional applications, there are a lot of models out in the market today. Don’t be confused by all the variations because they all try to visualize the same basic concepts of continuous improvement thinking. There’s PDSA, DMAIC, IPER, GFSIR, SACIM, IAIR, and so on, but I’m still a fan of the classic PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act).  It’s not a bad idea to look at all the different variations because one may resonate more than the others. Once the critical concepts are understood, it becomes more of a personal preference on what model we think works best with your situation.

PDCA

PDCA is probably the simplest of the bunch and it really comes down to this:

  1. Plan: Know what we want to do, why we want to do it, and how to do it.
  2. Do: Implement the plan, because just having a plan doesn’t change things for the better.
  3. Check: Find out if the plan is working and if we’re getting closer to what we want. This is where an open mind to learning is important because it’s very possible (probable) that our original plan wasn’t perfect.
  4. Act: This step depends on what we learn from checking. We can standardize what went well, refine the plan for what didn’t, and then go back to step 1. This is also a good place to celebrate successes and learnings because all work with no opportunity to happy dance is a horrible waste of a happy dance.

The key to PDCA is that it’s a never-ending cycle because everything can be better. It’s also an intuitive cycle that we all follow whether we talk about it or not. Plan-Do is the proactive piece that gets the ball rolling and Check-Act is the reactive piece to keep the ball rolling the right way

Meet the WHALE

With all the process improvement models out there, I’m surprised there aren’t more acronyms that spell out a real word so I though it would be fun to introduce one, but before that…

Risque Acronym Story (Feel free to skip this paragraph if easily offended):  Once upon a time, I worked for a company that was taking suggestions on a name for a system we were working on to centralize knowledge between Plastics Engineering departments across North America. The system would allow for efficient sharing of things we learned from our problem countermeasure and process improvement activities. For fun, I tossed “Plastics Engineering Networked Information System” into the ring, expecting it to be be cut off right away, but it made it past the initial screening, and I learned that not everyone has the same acronym obsession that I did. As curious as I was to see how long it would be before someone noticed, I opted to point out the unfortunate acronym and pulled it out of contention before things got messy. The original point of this story was that acronyms which spell words are more fun, but the more inspiring outcome came from witnessing firsthand that people of different ages, beliefs and backgrounds could still all come together and giggle like innocent school children in the face of shameless immaturity, so there’s hope for us yet.

WHALE is a slightly less controversial acronym that stands for What-How-Act-Learn-Evolve. WHALE’s only purpose is to provide a process improvement acronym that spells a real word.  Please note that it’s basically still PDCA:

 

  1. What – Know what we want to do, why we want to do it.
  2. How – Separating a plan into what we want and how we can get it can help reduce the risk of becoming too focused on what we’re doing and forgetting why we’re doing it.
  3. Act – The same as Do
  4. Learn – The same as Check but with a little more emphasis on the reason we check. We don’t check things just to produce completed check sheets.
  5. Evolve – Equivalent to Act but with the implication that we need to change with the situation starting from the current state.

 

Whatever improvement acronym we decide to use is not important as recognizing the importance of continually going through the improvement cycles. Even if we’re happy with the status quo, the unfortunate reality is that there is no status quo. The world is constantly changing and we need to be acting continuously and purposefully just to keep up.

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