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S.W.O.T. - stands for a substantial waste of time

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A contentious post maybe, but I personally think the SWOT is dead.

Many corporations use this Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats model as the basis for their corporate planning & whilst something is better than nothing, I really think SWOT only tells half the story.

For example, any strategy based on a SWOT might not be taking into consideration issues such as the company objectives, your unique value proposition, how that fulfils the market needs & most importantly, how everything gels together. I've seen many SWOTs that whilst full of good information that has obviously taken a long while to gather, it doesn't actually tell you anything about what you're actually going to do in order to grow the business.

Given we're only 4-5 months away from the SBS 2008 & EBS 2008 launch, many Partners are starting to think about how they position their business for the opportunities / challenges that the new products will bring. What will your objectives be? What skills do you need to build between now & then to deliver on those objectives? How will the market react?

One model that I've used to help with this level of strategic planning is the Capabilities vs Fit framework - see below for a very basic example. This builds upon the SWOT but also helps you think about the fit between what you're offering & what the market wants, & what you can do versus where you want to be.

Thoughts?

Robbie

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Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    I have tried this kind of approach for about 3 years in a city of 1,8 million of habitants. I got 1 customer for managed services along this time. Offer present in MS solution finder and own website. Spent about US$6000,00 in regional radio and event promos. If managed services works for you please let me know how! People want software, one to set it up (here enters the 'consultancy' which always is included in the deal but is the real value in all this story - the real hard thing is create the initial setup) and then forget it. then contract interns instead of pros, after all, deal with wsus and create some user accounts or groups is not a hard thing to do.