SWOT
From An Agile IT
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT)
An effective strategy is one that takes advantage of the organisation's opportunities by using its strengths and heading off threats.
- Strengths: attributes that are helpful to achieving the objective.
- Weaknesses: attributes that are harmful to achieving the objective.
- Opportunities: external conditions that are helpful to achieving the objective.
- Threats: external conditions that are harmful to achieving the objective.
Strengths and weaknesses are Internal factors. For example, a strength could a specialist expertise and a weakness could be the lack of a new product.
Opportunities and threats are external factors. For example, an opportunity could be new channels such as the Internet. A threat could be a new competitor or a technological change that makes existing products potentially obsolete.
The first part of any SWOT analysis is to collect a set of key facts about the organisation and its environment. Keep these facts focused to the objective.
The second part of a SWOT analysis is categorise the facts into strengths, weaknesses, opportunities or threats. It is best that this is not done by on individual as SWOT analysis can be very subjective - two people rarely come-up with the same results even when given the same information. It is important to note that any given fact may give rise to more than one evaluation, and so consider a fact as an opportunity as well as a threat and can consider if strengths can turn out to be weaknesses (visa-versa).
