How Long Should a PDSA Cycle Last?

Lloyd Provost, MS; Statistician, Associates for Process Improvement

One of the biggest mistakes I still see constantly is people don’t put an end date for their PDSA. They don’t have at the beginning, “Here’s what I want to learn, and let’s go out and start learning it.” We found it’s much better if they decide ahead of time, “I’m going to spend three days doing this” — or five patients doing this, or visits to two facilities to do this, but always have a clear end time for that. So even though we get to the end time and we still haven’t answered the question, we still should close that PDSA. We should study and say, “What have we done here?” and reform and start another PDSA. So getting a real, closed end time.

Another provocation we always use is listen to your discussion about the time for this PDSA cycle. So, if people are talking about “We want to get this done by the end of the quarter.” Or sometimes they’ll say, “Well, we need to get the done by the end of the month.” Drop down two timeframes. So if people are talking about quarter, drop down month to week. Say, “What can we do by next week?” If people are talking about months, we drop down to day. What can we do in one day to learn about this? If they’re talking about a week, drop down to an hour. By the end of the meeting we could get some feedback and have this going.

Once again, not necessarily because that’s what we want people to do, but we want them to use that as a provocation to think differently about the scale of the PDSA. So I think having a clear time date and that.