SWOT Analysis for Strategic Planning

SWOT analysis is one of the most commonly used analysis models in the strategic planning process. SWOT is an acronym that stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Opportunities and Threats are external factors with a potential impact on your organization. At the same time, the Strengths and Weaknesses are internal factors that affect your organization's ability to manage the identified opportunities and threats in your business environment. The analysis helps your organization assess both current and future potential for the business.

• Gather the team for strategic planning and use the SWOT template in Wide Narrow to do the SWOT analysis in a joint analysis workshop.
• Prepare the workshop in Clusters with separate Clusters for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Invite the strategic planning team to the Clusters for a collaborative working process.
• Add posts from Search or Inboxes to the Opportunities and Threats Clusters and use the Summary function to summarize well-formulated external threats and opportunities in strategically critical areas.
• Use the Summary function in Clusters to describe each Strength and Weakness. Make the Summaries ready to use in the SWOT analysis with clear headlines, descriptions, and trend icons.
• Prepare the SWOT Analysis template in the Report module before the workshop.
• Use the ready Summaries as building blocks in the SWOT analysis workshop. Summarize the result in the text field on the first page.

Wide Narrow features to use:
Wide Narrow SWOT Analysis Report Template, Clusters, and Summaries.

Examples of questions to discuss in the SWOT- analysis workshop:

Strengths:

• How can we leverage our unique company strengths to meet identified threats?
• What does our organization currently do well?
• What separates us from our competitors?
• What are our most valuable internal resources?

Weaknesses:

• What weaknesses make it challenging to meet identified threats to our business?
• What does our organization do poorly?
• What do our competitors do better?
• What processes or products need improvement to meet identified threats better? 

Opportunities:

• What external opportunities have we identified in the world around us?
• Are there any trends that we can take advantage of?
• Is there an emerging need for our product or service?

Threats:

• What external threats have we identified in the world around us?
• Are there any trends that may be a threat to our business?
• What emerging competitors should we keep an eye on?

User Access: The Report module is only available for Superusers.