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Managing PDSA Cycles

Resource
QI Project Registry User Guide

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Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) cycles are used to track iterative project progress. Documenting these cycles in the Registry will help record both the current state of the project and its historical evolution.

To Add a New PDSA Cycle:

  1. In the “PDSA Cycles” section of the project’s Project Profile, select the Add PDSA Cycle button (Figure 7).

  2. Follow the prompts to provide information for each of the Plan-Do-Study-Act Phases. The respective being edited is referred to as the “active phase”. Users may move between phases by using the controls provided in the PDSA Cycle interface (Figure 7).

  3. In the final phase (“Act”) of the cycle, select one of the following two options (Figure 8):

    • “Save” – To save the information entered for the current PDSA cycle.

    • “Save and Close Cycle” – To save the information entered for the current PDSA cycle AND mark the cycle as complete, which will prevent any further editing to the cycle, as well as allow a new PDSA cycle to be started, if desired.

Figure 7. PDSA Cycle Management: Add new cycle (blue); Edit cycle phase buttons (red arrows); Start next cycle phase button (green arrow)

pdsa-edit.png

Figure 8. PDSA Cycle Edit Form: Save button (blue); Save and Close Cycle button (red)

pdsa-form-edit.png

Items of Note
  • Only a single PDSA cycle may be active at a given time. In order to add a new cycle, the previous cycle(s) must be marked as complete in the “Act” phase of the cycle.

  • As PDSA cycles are added and/or updated, corresponding core project fields and sections that may have changed during iterative improvement cycles also should be updated accordingly, such as the data elements for the Methods and Interventions section.