PDCA Review Meeting Template

A PDCA review meeting runs a team through one turn of the plan-do-check-act cycle, the engine of continuous improvement at the heart of Lean and the Toyota Production System. Also known as the Deming cycle, PDCA treats every improvement as an experiment: you plan a change, do it, check the result against what you predicted, and act on what you learned.

When to use it

Use this whenever a team is running structured improvement cycles, often every week or two. PDCA suits process improvements, experiments, and any change where you want to learn deliberately rather than guess. The cadence matters less than the discipline of closing each loop before opening the next.

Who attends

Keep it to the improvement team and the owner of the process being changed, four to eight people. These are the people who set the plan, did the work, and can judge the results honestly. A coach often joins to keep the thinking rigorous.

How to run it

Recap the plan first, including the hypothesis and target, so the check is against an explicit prediction rather than a vague hope. Review what was actually done versus planned, then check results against target with data. Where there is a gap, analyze whether the plan, the execution, or the hypothesis was at fault. Then act: standardize a change that worked, adjust and rerun, or abandon an approach that did not. Close by defining the next cycle, because PDCA is a loop, not a one-time event.

Facilitator tips

• Make the prediction explicit in the plan so check has meaning.
• Check against data, not impressions of whether it felt better.
• When results miss, separate a bad plan from bad execution.
• Always close the loop by acting and setting the next cycle.

Common mistakes

• Planning and doing but never genuinely checking the result.
• Checking against a target nobody made explicit up front.
• Acting without learning, so the same cycle repeats.
• Treating PDCA as a single pass instead of a continuous loop.

Make improvement a deliberate loop. Run it in OrgTP and keep each PDCA hypothesis, result, and next cycle connected.