Plan do check & act

Plan, do, check & act away! 

Plan

In this phase of the model, you create your business or departmental plan, that is, for example, a marketing plan. This plan aligns with the mission and strategy of the organization or department. Within this plan, you work with clear objectives and KPIs that everyone understands. Objectives and KPIs are an absolute must for this model, because with those components you can go through the whole model. Without KPIs, you will never get the Plan Do Check Act cycle to work.

Do

In step 2 of the model, you are realizing your plans. You are actually implementing your plans. With that, there is room to experiment and learn. New challenges arise that you have to face. The ability to continuously improve the process as a team is crucial.

In this step, the quality of your data is very important, because in the execution you will be recording data. Think here about new leads, new customers or new orders. Your data must be in order, because otherwise you will base your plans on unreliable information. Without quality data, you have no information and no knowledge.

Check

Are your plans working and how are you scoring? This is what you look at when you are in the Check phase. You look at how the activities turn out relative to the plans made, a kind of evaluation. You then also grab the objectives and KPIs. You present the progress in the form of a dashboard or a report. You obviously discuss the progress, both positive and negative, with your team. This is how you arrive at a good conversation of the activities undertaken and performance of your team. You make detailed analyses with the team of the data behind the various objectives and KPIs. You break down KPIs by channel, device or product group and look at data combinations. This allows you to see exactly where things are going wrong. For example, the channel social media in combination with mobile doesn't work for the T-shirt category, but it does for shoes. Want to know how to pour data into a clear dashboard? Check out the possibilities of a dashboard in Google Data Studio.

Act

This phase is similar to the Plan phase. The big difference is that you are not going to redo the plans from scratch again, but you will adjust your plans and start optimizing them. You will also initiate several small or large improvement projects in this step. This is because you want to experiment to see if a certain direction works, because if that direction works you want to apply this solution in your regular process.

Because the PDCA model is a cycle, after the Act phase you re-enter the Plan phase. This is how you make your plan and results a little better every day.

Do you have questions about how you can take your marketing activities, performance and/or organization to the next level step by step? Do you also want to get more out of plan do check act and the Plan Do Check Act cycle? Please contact Benno. He will be happy to answer your questions.