Business Tools

VMOST: This stands for Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategy, and Tactical.
Success in an organization happens with top-down or bottom-up alignment. I was recently

reminded of is when working with a client who stated that their tactical is not connected to
the strategy. VMOST analysis is meant to help make that connection.
SWOT: The standard analysis tool, defined as Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and
Threats.
Strengths and weaknesses are internal to the organization, opportunities and threats are
external. SWOT requires you to be candid and provide an honest assessment of the state of
things. It forces you to create a dialogue with stakeholders to get different viewpoints.
Eventually, you focus in on the key issues.
PEST: This is a great tool to use in tandem with SWOT. The acronym stands for Political,
Economic, Social and Technology.
PEST reveals opportunities and threats better than SWOT, the direction of business change,
projects that will fail beyond your control, and country, region and market issues through
helping you create an objective view.
SOAR: This stands for Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, and Results. This is a great tool
if you have a strategic plan completed, and you need to focus on a specific impact zone.
I used SOAR to help a business that needed to focus on their business development
requirements due to an external market change. The organization needed to discuss how they
would recapture lost sales by $1 million per month to ensure they maintained their profitably.
Given that they had already done everything they could to cut costs and operate a lean
business, the SOAR was critical in helping define the focus for the next 12 to 24 months.
Boston Matrix (product and service portfolio): This tool requires you to analyze your
business product or service and determine if it is a cash cow, sick dog, questionable, or a
flying star.
I have applied this tool to product and service reviews with to help make product decisions
with consideration for market share and market growth. But it has no predictive value, does
not consider the environment, and you need to be careful with your assumptions. It does force
discussions on your present offering and whether it makes sense to maintain or enhance those
offerings. For example, maybe you are holding onto a business product that you love but is
really a sick dog and maybe there is a cash cow in your business that you are not optimizing.
A decision has to be made.
Porter’s Five Forces: This tool helps you understand where your business power lies in
terms of present competitiveness and future positioning strength. It forces you to analyze the
bargaining power of suppliers and customers, the threats to new entrants and substitutes, and
competitive rivalry in your marketplace. Using this tool helps you understand the balance of
power and to identify areas of potential profitability. According to Porter, this model should
be used at the line of business level.
Maturity Models: There are many maturity models that can be applied to a business. From
the evolution model, the technology model, to the team model. The idea is that every business
or department goes through a maturity cycle. The standard cycle is chaotic, reactive,
proactive, service, and value. If you were looking at processes in a department, you would
look to see where that process is on the continuum. Then you would determine where you
need to be and what it would take to get to that point of maturity. This is a simple
explanation. When using a maturity model, it is important that you have a clear problem
definition and solution context.
Root Cause Analysis: This is important, as there are times in the strategy analysis process
you need to dig deeper into a problem. This is where RCA is used. The key is that you need
to identify and specify the problem correctly, analyze the root cause using a systematic
approach, verify the causes, and determine the corrective actions. Implementation of the
corrective action is extremely important.
There are many definitions, tools, and techniques that could be addressed. The ones
mentioned here are only the tip of the iceberg for strategy analysis and become a foundational
part of the strategy analysis toolkit. In a short blog, there is no way to mention them all. But
you could create a tool checklist that you could use in your next planning and analysis
engagement to help you and your team define the present, future, risk and change state that
you need to succeed.

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VMOST: This stands for Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategy, and Tactical.

Success in an organization happens with top-down or bottom-up alignment. I was recently

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