Anyone whose ever been involved in doing business
planning has been exposed to doing a SWOT
analysis; strengths, weaknesses, opportunities
and threats. Keys to know about doing our
defective SWOT analysis, there are two components,
internal and external. Internally, you're
looking for strengths and weaknesses specifically
those things that what hamper your accomplishing
the strategy or the direction you have in
mind. External analysis is looking for opportunities
and threats. Again, those things specific
to where you anticipate that you're going
to be going. The result of this is a SWOT
profile which is where most people stop. Actually
that's a mistake. The key next step is to
try to identify what are, which of these are
likely to happen, more likely or less likely
and what impact do they likely to have, low
or high. Things that have low probability
and low impact, even though they're key issues,
they don't affect you and you should ignore
them. The second category would be those with
have high impact but are lot likely to happen.
These things rather than building a strategy
around them should be put on a watch list
that you keep track of. Third would be things
that have a high probability of happening
but they have relatively low impact. Rather
than making them the core of the strategy
or your business plan, create contingency
plans if they should happen. You really build
a plan around your strategic issues around
those things, those SWOT items that have high
probability and high impact.