Business planning tools e.g. SWOT, PESTEL analysis
Business planning tools are critical to you running your
organisation efficiently and delivering the best outcomes for
children, young people and families.
Two simple business-planning tools will help you understand your
organisation’s potential and can form the basis of future strategy
and organisational plans. However before you use them it is
important to understand what your organisation’s objective is: e.g.
to provide high quality childcare.
SWOT analysis
This will help you understand what your organisation’s
strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are. You may not
have carried out a SWOT analysis for a while, but it's not
something you just do once - it can help refresh where you are and
get you back thinking about the core issues.
If a clear objective has been identified, SWOT analysis can be
used to help in the pursuit of that objective. In this case, SWOTs
are:
- Strengths: attributes of the organization that are helpful to
achieving the objective.
- Weaknesses: attributes of the organization 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.
PESTEL analysis
A PESTEL analysis is an external facing planning tool that
builds on the opportunities and threats faced by an organisation.
Conducting a thorough PESTEL analysis will enable your organisation
to capitalise on opportunities and minimise threats.
Examples of PESTEL factors to consider include the Political,
Economic and Social, Technological Environmental and Legislative in
the first instance. For more examples, you can visit NCVO's website
(this is currently under development).
Once you've listed the forces or trends and the
implications, prioritise them (maybe around likelihood and impact),
then think about how you can maximise them (for opportunities) or
minimise them (for threats). Once again you are developing a
picture of the strategic issues facing your organisation, in
preparation for developing strategies to handle them.
Useful links
Voluntary Matters -
Online exercise to conduct SWOT
Value-based Management (Netherlands site) – SWOT
analysis
NCVO - What
is PEST? And information on using it (this site is
currently under development)
Go to next page: Policies, procedures, and
HR issues
Return to social enterprise menu
Return to useful links menu