SWOT Analysis Template in Strategic Planning Process

May 6, 2009 | Posted by lmfoong

SWOT Analysis Template | Matrix

is a common tools and form an integral part of a strategic planning process to derive business plans. A business plan is a description of your business which should provide adequate information about your business which shall describe but not limited to the following examples:-

• Your company and industry
• Your direction
• Your strategies
• Your market segment and marketing approaches
• Your products or services
• How your products or services are produced and delivered
• Who is your customer based

In order to formulate the above informations about your company, it is crusial that a systematic method is used to derived them and they should be as factual as possible. A common known method called Strategic Planning Process is deployed. As this method is quite a complicated affair, SWOT Analysis Template | Matrix is commonly used to guide the company to evaluate and formulate the appropriate strategies.

What is SWOT Analysis?
SWOT Analysis in short called the S.W.O.T. is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunites and Threats. These four factors which are commonly group into a SWOT Analysis Template or aSWOT Matrix. And it is used to guide you to collect data pertaining to these four factors. It is interesting to note that the four factors can be grouped into an external and internal factors. The External Factors are “Opportunities” and “Threats” wherease the Internal Factors refers to the “Strengths” and “Weaknesses”.

In order to collect the external factors, for example: you need to evaluate the “political”, “economical”, “societal” and Technological” aspect of your business. These are external factors. Obviously, those possitve aspects are grouped as opportunites while those negative aspects are grouped as Threats.

Then, you look into the Internal factors. Fortunately, being internal, you are the expert to do such evalaution yourself. Fro example, my view of internal factors are pertaining to internal capabilities in your own operations, examples; business processes, delivery channels, customer services, market researches, new product launching etc.

From the example stated in the above, it may end up a long list of factors. The next logical steps is to use a systematic approach to prioritise them based on its imapct and alignment to the companies direction so that it is value add to the business in a timely manner. The criteria for such a prioritization depends largely the decision made by the management team rather than a fixed guidelines. However, you should always remember to evaluate its impact to the bussiness and to some extend the urgency of such a factor.

The proper use of the SWOT factors are easily understood if we were to group them into the appropriate factors using a SWOT Analysis Template or SWOT Matrix

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