My Experience with SWOT Analysis

My Experience With SWOT Analysis

Any business needs constant introspection to survive in today’s competitive market. SWOT analysis is one of the parameters on which we analyze a business, to gauge where the business stands.
SWOT implies:
S – Strengths i.e. Internal strengths of the business that gives it an advantage or competitive edge over others.
W – Weakness i.e. Internal weaknesses of the business that works as a disadvantage for the business.
O – Opportunities i.e. External opportunities that the business can exploit for its benefit and gain.
T – Threats i.e. External threats that pose as a risk to the business.

Whether a business aims to introduce a new product or service or bring about a change in its processes, it needs to first analyze its SWOT criteria along with other evaluations to make the decision of embarking on it.

A business analyst also starts the analysis activities with Business analysis and then progresses to stakeholder analysis, requirement elicitation, requirement analysis, requirement communication and requirement management. And SWOT analysis is one of the basics of business analysis along with root cause analysis, gap analysis, decision analysis, strategy analysis, risk analysis, etc.

For instance my previous employer which is a major commodity exchange was going to come up with its IPO (initial public offer) in 2008, but at the time the company conducted a lot of research and analysis and SWOT was one of the modes of analysis, the outcome of its SWOT was;
S – The company is a pioneer in commodity trading and has a monopoly over it. Company was gaining momentum especially in its gold trading.
W – Commodity trading was still new in India and comparatively less popular than stock trading. The company still had to create awareness for the same and earn goodwill of the investors by assuring as much returns as stock trading and also make them aware of risk hedging opportunities present in commodity trading.
O – IPO‘s helped companies to gain public trust as well as create interest in the mind of large scale investors to invest in the company. Gold trading was already a popular concept in India.
T – The year 2008 was struggling with global recession. People were wary of investing in any projects or companies for the fear of possible bankruptcy which was an evident scenario back then.
Considering the above situation and lot of other financial and data analysis, it was finally decide to postpone the IPO.

At individual level too knowingly or unknowingly we conduct a lot of SWOT analysis -is on which a lot of our decisions are based, for e..g when we choose a vocation for our self we see do we have the skills for it , do we have an interest in that domain, what do we lag to be successful in that field, what are the job and salary prospects, growth prospects for this degree of education and what are the risks associated with it.