Strategic Management: SWOT Analysis for
Business
Dr. Nancy Agnes, Head, Technical Operations, Tutorsindia info@ tutorsindia.com
I. INTRODUCTION
II. COMPONENTS OF SWOT
A
SWOT
(Strengths,
Weaknesses,
Opportunities and Threats) analysis is a tool that
facilitates organizational managers to evaluate the
strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that
might exist in any kind of business. Conducting a
SWOT analysis could prove to be very instrumental
in helping the organization to acquire in-depth
insights into the past and conjure potential solutions
to current or potential challenges. This SWOT
analysis can be carried out for an organization that is
already existing within the market or for an
organization that intends to make an entry into the
market in the near future (Gürel, 2017). In particular,
SWOT comes across as a model that is very
fundamental and transparent that can evaluate what a
business is capable of doing or incapable of doing,
along with the possible opportunities and threats. The
SWOT analysis technique is to consider the
information generated through an environmental
evaluation and segregate it to internal (strengths and
weaknesses) and external issues (opportunities and
threats). Following the completion of this activity, the
SWOT analysis would determine what would aid the
organization in realizing their objectives, and the kind
of challenges that need to be overcome or reduced in
order to realize the intended outcomes (Namugenyi et
al., 2019). A large number of organizations execute a
SWOT analysis during the stage of their strategic
planning and they attempt to identify and scrutinize
the prevalent resources, both externally as well as
internally, examining their patterns and trends that
might result in either positive or negative business
outcomes.
The actual process of SWOT analysis would
comprise of splitting four areas into two dimensions.
The four components of SWOT as mentioned above
is Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats.
Strengths and weaknesses can be deemed as factors
that are internal and also make up the organizational
attributes while, opportunities and threats would be
factors that are external and are usually the
environmental attributes (Gürel, 2017).
III. STRENGTHS
This, as you would know makes up the first
component of the SWOT. This component would
take into account aspects of your organization that is
doing particularly well. It need not be anything
tangible or definite. The strength of your organization
could also be something that is intangible such as the
brand image of an organization or something which
can be very easily defined such as the organization’s
unique selling proposition (USP) of a specific line of
products (Shewan, 2019). In other cases, it could also
be the human resources of the organization; robust
leadership or a highly effective research and
development team. Thus you identify the strength of
your organization.
The objective of this paper is to familiarize
you with the components of SWOT and tips to
conduct a SWOT analysis
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VI. THREATS
IV. WEAKNESSES
Following the identification of the
organization’s strengths, the next step would be to be
critical about oneself and identify and list out
anything that you think would be the weakness of
your organization. Weakness does not refer to
physical weakness here but rather it refers to aspects
of the organization that is pulling your organization
back. Weaknesses could be anything such as financial
constraints, lack of skilled personnel, superior brand
image of competitor etc. Akin to strengths,
weaknesses also are an innate aspect of your
organization. Therefore, it would help if you focus on
resources, procedures, systems and people. Consider
aspects that you needs improvement and the kind of
practices that you need to curb (Wang et al., 2014).
V. OPPORTUNITIES
Lastly, the component of threat would
comprise of anything that has the propensity to make
a negative impact on your business externally. These
would include; problems within the supply-chain,
manpower shortage or changes in market demands
etc. It is very necessary that you anticipate threats and
initiate appropriate action to negate the threat before
it impacts you and causes a loss to your business or
thwarts your growth (Sarbah & Otu-Nyarko, 2014).
To identify threats, it might help if you try to list out
the bottlenecks to your business such as delivering
your finished goods to the market, drop in quality of
your products amongst others. Further, you should
always keep yourself abreast of the activities that are
being carried out by your competitors and modify
your strategy to tackle that threat. Also there is the
threat of new governmental or trade policies so, you
need to anticipate such threats to stay ahead of the
competition and ensure success.
VII. CONCLUSION
SWOT analysis is a tool that is being
utilized within the domain of strategic management
for the past five decades. It has turned out to be a
highly treasured tool as far as planning and decisionmaking is concerned. While there are a number of
tools for analysis that have been utilized during the
strategic management process, over the years a
technique that has been extensively used is SWOT
analysis. The use of SWOT helps in evaluating the
external as well as the internal environment of the
organization and thereby lends support to situations
where strategic decisions are required. This technique
can be applied in several areas that require strategic
analysis for an industry, a product, an organization, a
city, a project or even an individual.
Opportunities would refer to chances of
something good or positive happening. However, it
would not happen on its own, you need to identify the
opportunity and seize it. Opportunities would
generally tend to emerge from situations that exist
beyond your organization, and it requires foresight on
your part as to what might happen in future. Market
or technology developments can be one (Brad &
Brad, 2015). For instance, in case there is a surge in
demand for a niche product that your organization
can produce, that is an opportunity you can leverage.
But as mentioned, you need to be able to identify
opportunities and harness it such that it makes a
difference to your organization.
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REFERENCES
Brad, S. & Brad, E. (2015). Enhancing SWOT
Analysis with TRIZ-based Tools to Integrate
Systematic Innovation in Early Task Design.
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Gürel, E. (2017). Swot Analysis: A Theoretical
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Namugenyi, C., Nimmagadda, S.L. & Reiners, T.
(2019). Design of a SWOT Analysis Model and
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Shewan, D. (2019). How to do a SWOT analysis for
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