September, 2007
Howard Smith
As every process change practitioner knows, simple business tools catch on. Who hasn’t heard of a SWOT chart – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats? On the other hand how many business people know how to perform a SWOT analysis effectively? Drawing a SWOT chart might look easy, but solving the problem it represents is far from trivial. Many of us use the simple SWOT framework and hardly ever stop to think about what the structure of the chart really means. It is all too easy to fall into the trap of considering our work done if we can get the team members to agree on what to write in the four boxes! Unfortunately, the process often ends there. In this article, I’ll show how to go beyond a simplistic SWOT analysis and move on towards an actionable implementation strategy.