The Five Most Common Swot Faq – Answered!

There are five most common SWOT FAQ that people often ask to clear out their confusion on the subject. In this article, we are going to pinpoint all those SWOT FAQ and try to answer them one by one so that you will understand what it is, its importance and what benefits you can get from the said strategic planning tool.

The five most common SWOT FAQ are listed below.

SWOT FAQ number 1: What is SWOT?

SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. These four aspects basically sum up a company’s resources (financial and technological), its weak points, the possible expansion and developmental factors that it can exploit or take advantage of and of course, the threats that could affect the company’s profitability. This strategic planning tool was developed by Albert Humphrey, a business consultant for the Stanford Research Insitute in California, USA during the 1960’s.

SWOT FAQ number 2: Why use SWOT?

It is imperative that a business serve as its own critic. The SWOT Analysis forces an objective review of the company, its competitors and the marketplace. If the said analysis is developed accurately, it can even help an organization determine in which aspect it is succeeding and which aspect does it fail, hence, the organization will be able to allocate their resources based on importance. This will then lead them into focusing on their dominant features while simultaneously balancing their weakness and coming up of ways to either fix or minimize the effects of the said weak points to the company.

SWOT FAQ number 3: How does the SWOT Analysis work?

This strategy aims to look at the organizations current performance and evaluate the external factors that may affect the company in general. Each attribute for the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats section are being identified and evaluated. Once the evaluation is done, the point of balance starts. When we say point of balance, this is the process in which the four attributes are being plotted to have the strengths versus weaknesses and opportunities versus threats compatibility. SWOT analysis will provide an insight regarding the company’s capabilities, customer-related factors and competition.

SWOT FAQ number 4: How do you develop a SWOT Analysis framework?

Usually, the SWOT Analysis framework starts with a major brainstorming. The project leaders gathers his best experts from different departments and conduct a meeting where the four aspects of SWOT will be discussed. SWOT has evolved into different formats, but the basic framework and idea is that, you must have a visual aid where the four aspects will be depicted. A whiteboard is often divided into four to make four quadrants with the respective SWOT aspects as labels for each. The ideas are listed down and discussed one by one. All the ideas gathered will then be reviewed and al irrelevant information will be eliminated until the core points will be the only data left.

SWOT FAQ number 5: Does using SWOT mean that I don’t have to use other strategic planning tools?

No. You must use different strategic tools when developing strategies and SWOT is just one of them. Try to use as many tools as you can. You have to use all the help that you can get because planning a strategy is literally mapping out the future of the organization. If your strategy fails, the company will obviously fail as well. Worst case scenario, it could even lead into total vanishing of the company from the business world.

By: Sam Miller

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