My team is used to Scrum, but management wants to introduce the PDCA cycle to improve our internal deployment processes. Does anyone have experience blending PDCA with Agile? Specifically, where does the "Plan" stage fit into a standard two-week sprint without causing meeting fatigue?
3 answers
Integrating PDCA into Agile is actually very natural because the two methodologies share the same DNA of iterative improvement. You can map the "Plan" phase directly to your Sprint Planning session. The "Do" phase is the actual coding and development work within the sprint. The "Check" phase happens during your Sprint Review and Retrospective, and the "Act" phase is where you implement the process improvements for the next sprint. I’ve found that framing it this way helps the team see PDCA as a quality layer rather than extra work or more unnecessary meetings.
When you map "Check" to the Retrospective, do you focus strictly on the product quality or do you also use it to analyze the team's velocity and workflow bottlenecks?
We treat every individual User Story as a mini PDCA cycle. It ensures quality is baked into the task level rather than just being an afterthought at the end of the sprint.
That is a great perspective, Laura. Breaking it down to the story level really enforces a "Quality First" mindset throughout the entire development lifecycle.
Daniel, we focus on both. The product quality is checked in the Review, but the workflow bottlenecks are the primary focus for the "Act" phase in the Retrospective. We try to identify one specific process "tweak" per sprint to ensure we aren't overwhelming the team with too many changes at once.