Top 4 Alternatives To SWOT For Business Planning

When it comes to business planning, there are many tools you can use to assess your business. One of the most known and used tools is SWOT. It is an acronym and stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It is no doubt that this tool is useful, easy to understand, and quite handy. However, just like any other tool – it has limitations too.

So, what can be done to overcome the limitations of SWOT?

How about we use some tools are alternatives to SWOT?

In this article, I will try to highlight some alternatives to SWOT and how you can use them in your business planning and decision-making.

Limitations Of SWOT

Let us quickly go through some limitations of SWOT that may attract us towards other business tools.

1. Only An Overview Of Your Business

SWOT provides an overview of your business. It does not provide an in-depth analysis of each metric. Without in-depth research, you may lack certain pointers that would have been useful for you. An overview of your business would miss out a lot under each category of SWOT. One needs to ensure proper research and efforts are done to dig deeper into each metric for better clarity.

2. Subjective Approach

SWOT is quite subjective. A metric that is your strength can be perceived as a weakness by others in your business. It does not allow us to segregate the metrics clearly every time. Similarly, you may rule a particular metric to be a threat. However, the same metric can be ruled as an opportunity by others in your business. All this can become complex when analyzing your business that operates with a lot of stakeholders.

3. No Consideration Of External Factors

Many times your business may be affected due to some external factors. These factors directly impact your business and need to be dealt with. However, in a SWOT analysis, these external factors are not considered with priority. Some external factors may include changes in government policies, changes in tax rules, the price changes of your raw materials, and much more.

4. No Solutions In A SWOT

SWOT helps you identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. But does it help you map your strategy on how to overcome your weaknesses? This is what makes it confined. It can help you get an overview but no planning of solutions. It does not provide us to determine the next step and just stops at identifying the metrics in our business.

There can be many other limitations apart from the ones mentioned in this article. However, these are the main limitations experienced by businesses.

Tools That Are Alternatives To SWOT

Here are some business tools that are alternatives to SWOT.

1. NOISE Analysis

It is also an acronym. It stands for Needs, Opportunities, Improvements, Strengths, and Exceptions. This business planning tool is more solution-oriented. It allows you to analyze your business and map out a solution. It does not just identify some metrics and leave for the day.

This tool was created by Mike Cardus.

Here is how you can perform a NOISE analysis for your business.

A. Determine The Goal

The most basic step in performing a NOISE analysis is to determine your goal. What exactly do you want to achieve? Maybe you need more lead generation. Or maybe you are trying to do more sales. Your goal can be anything.

B. Create The NOISE Chart

This is where you and your team create the NOISE chart.

• Needs : What additional tools or resources may help you achieve your goals? List them.

• Opportunities: What are the areas that you have not yet explored and hold immense potential? The

• Improvements: What are areas that are working well but can be improved? The things that can be improved and are under-utilized for the moment.

• Strengths: What do you do best and what gives you results? Things that you can control. Things that have been giving you positive results for your business.

• Exceptions : It contains the things you listed in the above metrics that are already happening. You filter them out.

C. Analyse Your Chart

This is the most important part of the NOISE analysis.

Your team can now analyze the entire chart and see an overview of your current business status. Your team needs to find all ideas under each metric that go together. Pick ideas that are quite good and can become a solid base for future plans.

While performing this, you do not start in the order of the acronym, instead,

You start with Strengths.

Then you carry the process in this order

Needs, Opportunities, Improvements, and end with Exceptions

D. Identify Clusters

Whatever ideas you picked in the previous step, you grouped them together in each metric. Now you need to group them inter-metric-wise.

Let’s say your strength was lead generation.

And your opportunities were the US market.

So you club them together and use your lead generation skills for the US market.

E. Planning And Target

The final part of the analysis is to create a plan using the previous 4 steps. You may repeat any step and prepare a plan for your business.

The other important aspect is to set your targets for each plan you make. Without targets, you won’t be able to measure your progress.

2. SOAR Analysis

This is another tool that has immense potential to help your business. It is often regarded as a tool that includes your goals right from the start of the process. It is also an acronym. It stands for Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, and Results.

Here is how you perform a SOAR analysis for your business

A. Identify Each Metric

• Strengths: You identify your best habits and what your business is doing well. There are always some aspects of every business that it does well. This will count as your strength. It could be your customer retention skills, new sales, or even regular payments to your customers.

• Opportunities: These are the areas that you can explore and are currently untapped. The business potential for which you have the resources but did not really execute. This can be a particular market or a particular feature in your product that can do wonders for you.

• Aspirations: These are the goals you wish to achieve. These are the things your business cares about. It would also include suggestions from other stakeholders in the company. This is essentially your target. It can be doing more sales, launching a new feature within a particular timeframe, and much more.

• Results: This is where you plan to measure your progress. Without measuring your progress, you may move in any unrealistic direction. This is where you start measuring your execution and determining if you are getting results or not.

B. Create A Chart And Delegate Work

Once you are through identifying the acronym metrics, you can start preparing a plan and delegate the work to the concerned members of your team. It can include your team or members from other teams too.

C. Revisit The “Results” Metrics

You need to revisit the pointers under your “Results” metric and assess your progress. If things are going in a positive direction, you can continue. Else, you may repeat the first step and prepare a different plan with a different strategy.

3. Feedback Approach

Many businesses are client-oriented. You serve a lot of customers and other businesses too. Your service is what you deliver. And it can be anything. Instead of performing any analysis at your end, you let your customers do it for you!

The Feedback approach is when you reach out to every customer and client of your business to provide feedback on a regular basis. The feedback structure includes what you are struggling with. You may ask them their views on any weaknesses they think you have, or complaints they have. They can provide feedback on your strengths and things that they think your business does the best.

So, in a feedback approach, you can ask everything you were analyzing yourself in the NOISE analysis or the SOAR analysis. This approach is quite effective as your customers may provide you insights from a different perspective that may have been missed by you.

4. Competitor Analysis

In all the methods above, you are analyzing your own business. Undoubtedly, this is important. Every business should know what are their strengths, weaknesses, and other metrics. But, one aspect that can give you an extra edge is competitor analysis.

Many businesses focus too much on themselves. No one is asking me not to do this. But, analyzing other businesses provides a great way to understand certain loopholes in your own business. Learning from other competitors is always a great method. You learn about the strengths, weaknesses, or threats your competitors are managing. This helps you to compare your business model with theirs. This would allow you to assess where you stand in the current market and how you can improve.

Bottom Line

SWOT is a great tool – no doubt. But like every tool, it has its own pros and cons.

This is where you may try different tools as per your requirements and needs. The tools I have mentioned are used by many businesses and even startups. Needless to say, the above-mentioned tools would also have their merits and demerits. But this is why you can try different tools and determine what works best for you.

There is no predetermined formula for assessing any business and its goals. The tools are there to help you to some extent. Moreover, there are no restrictions in any business to use only certain tools in the business planning books. You can come up with your own method too. The only objective is to get results without hampering your current business growth.

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