Last updated on

Plan Do Review and being an Intelligent Customer

Productivity Engineering Creativity

There are numerous “decision cycles”, as outlined on Wikipedia, including the famous Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) from the quality bible ISO 9001, but I favour a simple 3-step model of Plan-Do-Review. I feel like the “Act” of PDCA is really a “Do” in disguise and therefore should be preceded by a Plan and then go into the Do loop for a continuous cycle. In other words PDCA feels like the “Acting” to make a change is done without Planning, if that makes sense…

There is of course the simple truth that word triplets are biologically easy to remember and occur throughout literature:

  • The three wise men
  • The holy trinity
  • The three musketeers
  • Morning, noon and night
  • Trouble comes in threes
  • Three’s a crowd
  • Goldilocks and the three bears
  • … the list could go on and on…

So I’ll happily stick to my Plan-Do-Review to make simple and meaningful progress at work and in life.

I’m also struck by the alignment with the trio from ONR’s Intelligent Customer capability in NS-TAST-GD-049 simplified to Specify-Oversee-Accept.

I’ve sketched out the alignment below which I think is a powerful continuous cycle and expresses to me the equal importance of all three steps if you want to get Intelligent Results.

IMG_0594