SWOT analysis

SWOT analysis evaluates the strategic position of organizations and is often used in the preliminary stages of decision-making processes[2] to identify internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieving goals.

[13] SWOT analysis may also be used in pre-crisis planning, preventive crisis management, and viability study recommendation construction.

This strategy ensures that an organization leverages its core competencies, resources, and capabilities to capitalize on favorable market conditions, emerging trends, or unmet customer needs.

This process may involve analysing competitors' cost structures, sources of profits, resources and competencies, competitive positioning, product differentiation, degree of vertical integration, historical responses to industry developments, among other factors.

[12] Michael Porter developed the five forces framework as a reaction to SWOT, which he found lacking in rigor and too ad hoc.

The SVOR table provides an intricate understanding of the elements hypothesized to be at play in a given project:[29]: 9 Constraints consist of: calendar of tasks and activities, costs, and norms of quality.

[31]) The first chapter of the textbook stated, without using the acronym, the four components of SWOT and their division into internal and external appraisal: Deciding what strategy should be is, at least ideally, a rational undertaking.

Its principal subactivities include identifying opportunities and threats in the company's environment and attaching some estimate of risk to the discernible alternatives.

[6]Looking back from three decades later, in the book Strategy Safari (1998), management scholar Henry Mintzberg and colleagues said that Business Policy: Text and Cases "quickly became the most popular classroom book in the field", widely diffusing its authors' ideas, which Mintzberg et al. called the "design school" model (in contrast to nine other schools that they identified) of strategic management, "with its famous notion of SWOT" emphasizing assessment of a company's internal and external situations.

[37] By 1973, the acronym was well-known enough that accountant William W. Fea, in a published lecture, mentioned "the mnemonic, familiar to students, of S.W.O.T., namely strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats".

A few examples of books that describe SWOT analysis and are widely held by WorldCat member libraries and available in the Internet Archive are: