# Quality Anywhere Clinic · team channel
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PDSA Cycle Log
Submit a PDSA plan
Teams have no shortage of ideas. What usually happens next is that the idea skips straight to implementation, or gets forgotten, and either way nobody ever finds out whether it actually led to an improvement. A PDSA cycle log fixes that middle step. Below is a working mockup of one built inside a team chat channel: one list, one short form, and three small automations, so teams can test ideas transparently, collaborate on them asynchronously, and keep improving continuously. Press play, or step through it.
There are two doors into the log, and they're deliberately kept separate. Anyone with an idea worth testing walks through the first: a short form that asks what you're trying to accomplish, what you predict will happen, how small you can make the test, and when you'll come back to look. About ten minutes. The second door isn't a form at all, because forms create entries rather than update them. One named person, agreed at the start, goes into the list, finds the entry, and completes Do, Study and Act on the item itself.
Three things happen automatically. When a plan goes in, the channel gets a post so the team knows a test is starting, with the prediction visible before the test runs. That's on purpose: it gives anyone the chance to say "I don't think that's what will happen" while the conversation can still change something. When a cycle closes, the channel hears what was learned. And every Monday morning, anything past its review date that's still open gets a nudge to the one person responsible for closing it.
That Monday check is the single most important part of the design. The most common way a log like this fails isn't that people refuse to use it. It's that plans go in, the work happens, and nobody circles back. Six months later the log is a list of good intentions.
Nothing exotic. A Microsoft List held inside the team's channel (so it belongs to the team, not to whoever set it up), a List Form for submissions, a conditionally shaped item form for closing, and three Power Automate flows: announce the plan, announce the closure, run the Monday check. Roughly an afternoon of setup, and none of it needs a developer.
Working in Slack instead? The shape translates: Slack lists or a pinned canvas for the record, Workflow Builder for the submission form and the posts, and a scheduled workflow for the weekly check. The tools matter less than the pattern: one shared record, a required prediction, a named closer, and a nudge that never forgets.
I've written up the full build, field by field and flow by flow, including the traps (why only Plan fields can be marked required, why three hidden housekeeping columns must never be deleted, and why the closure flow will loop forever if you let it). Read the build guide.
The animation shows the log in motion, but sometimes you just want to look at the sheet itself. Here's the full field set from the walkthrough above, completed end to end as a single worksheet, including the fields the animation skims past (what went differently, why the prediction missed, the rationale for the decision). This is what one finished cycle looks like in the list.
PDSA cycle worksheet · completed sample
The blank version has the field prompts written in, so it doubles as a paper or offline starting point for teams that want to draft a cycle before the log exists.