How to do a SWOT Analysis

Elizabeth Harrin

A SWOT analysis is a way to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats inherent in your business, project or team. It’s a good way to start a strategy session as it opens up plenty of discussion and prompts you and your team to think creatively about the types of challenges facing the organization.

You don’t need anything special to do a SWOT analysis. Mind mapping software helps when you come to present your results, but you can equally note down your answers in the first instance on paper. You can work alone or with your team, or separately and then bring your individual ideas together to the group for further discussion. It’s a very flexible yet structured way of brainstorming.

First consider what you are SWOT-ing about. Is it the organization as a whole, a department, or a project? When you are ready to get started, work your way through the acronym like this.

Strengths

First, identify your strengths. This is where you are better than your competition perhaps because:

·       You have lower overheads

·       You have access to cheaper resources

·       You are fast to market

·       You have a mature infrastructure.

Hopefully you can think of lots of reasons where you excel and why customers like dealing with you. Consider your strengths from your own internal perspective and also what people outside the department, project or business might say.

Strengths help you uncover the opportunities that you can exploit to advance the company, strengthen customer relationships or develop your products.

Weaknesses

Now look at where you are not so strong. These are areas where you could improve such as:

·       The reason behind customer complaints

·       Being too reliant on one customer

·       Being too reliant on one piece of infrastructure or technology

·       Not having enough staff skilled in all areas.

And so on. There is no benefit in being coy about your weaknesses: embrace them during this part of the brainstorming session, even though it might be uncomfortable.

Opportunities

This is where you consider the trends and challenges that, if embraced, could become real opportunities for your team. If you are struggling to think of some, look at the weaknesses and turn them on their head. What would happen if you overcame your weaknesses and how could you achieve that?

Again, it will help to think about this from your own perspective and then from the perspective of your customers, suppliers or competitors. What are your competitors worried that you will do this year? That’s a threat to them and therefore possibly an opportunity for you.

You may find that some items appear on multiple lists. The opportunity of disruptive technologies, for example, could also be a threat to your business, as we’ll see next.

Threats

This section lets you brainstorm the issues that your company or team is facing or could face in the future. For example:

·       Changes to regulation, policy and law

·       Disruptive technologies

·       Changes to working practices or best practices

·       Financial risks such as the supplier who doesn’t deliver or customers who don’t pay.

Threats can come from competitors as well as the market or local economy. If you don’t know what your competitors are doing then that’s also a threat!   

With these four lists in place you can now move on to refine your SWOT analysis.

Prioritising the SWOT

Prioritise and shortlist the responses you have gathered. Focus on the essentials because you can’t build a strategy around 150 opportunities. You’ll have to pick the items that you feel are the critical elements to work on right now. Include as many as you think you’ll realistically be able to work on.

If you haven’t already, involve your team in picking the items from your list that they consider the most important. Have them add their own as well: they are likely to see things from a different perspective to you so they have something unique to bring to the discussion.

Write up your final SWOT analysis in your mind mapping tool, parking any ideas that didn’t make the final cut in case you can use them in the future.

Create your Strategy

Finally, you’ve now got the information you need to input into the strategy for the team, project or even at a corporate level. To be clear: the SWOT analysis is not your strategy. But it does give you very useful information about what you should be working on: addressing your key threats, capitalising on opportunities where you can, building on your strengths and overcoming the weaknesses that are holding you back. You may need to further refine and prioritise the lists in order to pick the items that best lend themselves to whatever you want to do with the data next.

The data in the SWOT can easily be shaped to form the backbone of a wide-ranging strategy for longevity.