Guidelines for Swot Analysis

Guidelines for SWOT Analysis

The SWOT analysis is one of the most basic and intuitive tools of strategic analysis and planning. It is also the most commonly used because it can be applied to all strategic situations, it requires little formal training, and it facilitates group analysis.

A SWOT analysis is completed by examining the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of a company or a business unit within a company. Typically, participants in the SWOT analysis use their individual experience and business knowledge to identify the internal strengths and weaknesses of their company and to outline external opportunities and threats. Initially, the SWOT analysis can be conducted as an individual exercise, leading to a group discussion, and then individual reflection, and finally meetings to refine and complete the analysis.

Participants outline their perspectives on their company’s strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats in a format similar to that shown below. The analysis is expected to identify and summarize each element of the SWOT very briefly so that strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats can be summarized on a few sheets of paper, understood simply, and relationships across the SWOT can be identified.

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A good SWOT analysis will have the following characteristics:

• It will offer a complete list of the important strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that exist in a company and its competitive environment.

• It will help to prioritize critical SWOT issues from less important issues.

• It will clearly identify strengths and weaknesses as characteristics internal to a company and opportunities and threats as characteristics external to a company.

• It will clearly distinguish between strengths v. weaknesses, opportunities v. threats, opportunities v. strengths/weaknesses, or threats v. weaknesses.

• It will identify relationships between SWs and OTs. Specifically, it...