DQ Responses

RESPOND TO EACH QUESTION WITH AT LEAST 250 WORDS and 1 Reference

Guided response: Evaluate several of your peers’ perspectives. For at least two peers who had different roles than yours, suggest two additional needs or concerns for your peer’s role. Explain why these aspects would be pertinent or would affect your peer’s assigned role.

Question 1 (Kathleen)

A SWOT analysis is an excellent tool that businesses can use to examine their weaknesses and help explore possible opportunities to improve. Strengths and threats are also addressed and a SWOT analysis can uncover details that ultimately help guide the decision-making process. 

Gathering the information for a SWOT analysis should not come strictly from internal sources. “Identify strengths and weaknesses from both your own point of view and that of others, including those you serve or deal with. Do others see problems—or assets—that you don't?” (Renault, 2017, Listing your internal factors section, para. 2). This is a valuable angle to consider when doing a company’s SWOT analysis because it allows the internal teams to see things from a different perspective that they may not have realized before. An external outlook can introduce potential strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities that could be taken for granted because employees are exposed to them every day and things that are great characteristics of the company just become their norm. 

A complete SWOT can help a company succeed because it forces leadership to realistically examine several different aspects of the company’s operations. It is easy to fall into patterns and do things the way they have always been done; however, if a company wants to succeed, it is vital that they diligently and realistically look at each factor of a SWOT analysis frequently. An additional suggestion, from Savickas (2003), is that once the analysis is complete, the team then needs to conclude with an “analysis of the analyses” to review and integrate the findings of the SWOT analysis. 

QUESTION 2 (Christopher Ellis)

The SWOT analysis stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.  It is one of the basic tools for creating strategies and making business decisions.  The video shared by Prof. Cadrain in the announcements was helpful in visualizing the different individual sections of a SWOT.  The Finance Storyteller used a quadrant axis in his video to explain internal vs. external.  When developing a SWOT analysis, he provided some example questions that should be answered as the starting point for filling in each of the different sections.  Strengths are things the company does really well.  This section should include the companies competitive advantages.  Conversely weaknesses are the opposite.  What are the companies disadvantages?  Where does the company need to improve its products/processes?  Opportunities and threats are external factors like trends, market conditions, or events that can the company can either take advantage of or be impacted by.

One really important and valuable addition to a SWOT analysis (which is not included in the acronym) is the Voice of the Customer.  Surveying current, previous, and potential customers for their opinions can provide important insights and either validate the assumptions/findings of the SWOT or uncover other potential SWOT items not previously considered.

Lastly the SWOT is meant to be a tool for decision making and strategy creation.  Based on the SWOT the different items should be prioritized by  the impact to the business and strategic decisions should be made based on the impact identified by the SWOT.  Also, SWOT should be periodically revisited and updated to ensure the "strategy compass" is always calibrated to the current business environment.