Swot Strategic Planning Tool – An Ingredient For Effective Future Planning

There are a lot of tools used in planning a strategy and one of the most common due to its simplicity and flexibility is the SWOT strategic planning tool. When we say strategic planning, this is just a business terminology for a long term future planning. Obviously, the reason why you have to develop a strategy as early as now is to be able to ensure that your company or enterprise will be able to survive and continue to thrive in a span of one to five years and beyond. Although it may seem that there are a lot of options to choose from when it comes into picking the right supporting method for planning your strategy, you don’t have to make it so complicated because of two reasons: for one you don’t have to pick just one because no tool is a stand alone tool. The second reason is that all tools have their own focus and specialties.

Before anything else, let us first have a little review about the SWOT strategic planning tool. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. These four aspects are grouped as the internal and external attributes of the company. The Strengths and Weaknesses pertains to the internal characteristics of the company such as resources, management and the likes, while the Opportunities and Threats are focused on the external factors that can affect the business. For example, a possible expansion of a company in a specific marketplace is considered as an opportunity, while the changes in trends and fashion can be a threat. Using SWOT strategic planning, a company will be able to plot these four attributes and have the chance to turn the weaknesses into strengths and the threats to opportunities. The possibilities are just endless.

The matrix of a SWOT strategic planning tool is a framework of four quadrants, each labeled respectively according to the SWOT acronym. The four quadrants turn into a descriptive image in order to analyze the company’s position now and how you want it to be in the future.

Strengths – Good conditions NOW (Build, Maintain and Leverage)

Weaknesses – Bad conditions NOW (Stop, Change and Remedy)

Opportunities – Good conditions in the future (Prioritize, Optimize and Exploit)

Threats – Bad conditions in the future (Shield and Counter)

Basically, there are three simple steps in optimally utilizing the SWOT strategic planning tool. Regardless of what you are planning (personal or organizational plans), the process remains the same.

1.List all the organization’s strengths and weaknesses. Be realistic and accurate, as this will feed the SWOT strategic planning tool which in turn will turn into an array of SWOT results that you can evaluate. If you want an accurate evaluation, feed the tool accurate data.

2. List all the potential strength’s (opportunities) and potential weaknesses (threats). Once again, be realistic, but not too modest.

3.Re-sort all the data that you have listed down and eliminate all the irrelevant and unnecessary things in your SWOT strategic planning module. Once you have trimmed it down and have picked all the important items, rank it based on its important and then you can start your plan of action from there.

Remember when we said that all tools have their own respective specialties? Even though a SWOT strategic planning tool evaluates the internal and external factors, it is focused mostly on the internal attributes that will hit the company directly. This is the reason why all strategic planning tools should conjunct each other for an effective strategy development.

By: Sam Miller

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