The quality cycle

Plan

This includes formal planning at all levels such as university level planning, faculty and divisional planning, school, departmental or unit planning, course or work team planning.  At the individual level it reflects the planning that people do either by project, or over time, including yearly or daily planning

Act

This includes all the intentional activities that are undertaken to meet objectives, implement plans and produce outcomes.

Evaluate

This comprises two major aspects - monitoring and review.

Monitoring is a short and medium term activity mainly for developmental or formative purposes.  It may use formal or informal methods and make use of existing data or generate new data.  Action and monitoring usually develop together, informing each other, hand-in-hand.

Review is a longer term and more formal process that has both formative and summative purposes.

Improve

The process by which the results of evaluation - both monitoring and review - are fed back in order to generate improvement. Often this causes modification to an existing plan or development of a new plan and thus the cycle commences once more.