SWOT Analysis: A Situation audit of your own organization
SWOT Analysis: A Situation audit of your own organization
You will conduct a situation audit of your own company for this project. During the next 12 steps of this project, you will prepare to perform your audit by reviewing various aspects of your organization, such as its mission, goals, and values. Before submitting your final situation audit, you will be allowed to submit different parts of your audit for instructor feedback. Read the complete description of the final deliverable and the steps involved in completing it.
Start your situation audit by going to Step 1: Organize Your Work.
When you submit your project, the competencies listed below will be used to evaluate it. Use the checklist below to double-check your work before submitting it.
1.3: Provide sufficient, properly cited evidence to back up the writer’s claims.
1.6: Use Standard Written English conventions.
6.3: Determine the strategic value of an organization’s internal strengths and weaknesses.
6.4: Create and recommend plans for a company’s long-term competitive advantage.
8.1: Assess primary business/organizational systems and procedures and provide improvements recommendations.
8.3: Recognize and differentiate between organizational structure kinds and their performance implications.
9.1: Create organizational structures, procedures, and processes that support the organization’s strategic goals.
9.2: Examine how human capital can be used to gain a competitive advantage.
10.2: Analyze financial statements to assess and improve organizational performance.
10.3: Make the best financial decisions to achieve an organization’s objectives.
Step 1: Organize Your Work
Read the guidelines for the final deliverable below and think about how you’ll undertake an audit of your own company.
Instructions for the Final Deliverable: A Situation Audit and a Preliminary Analysis of Key Factors
Your manager has assigned you to draft a scenario audit that will provide an overview of your company (or an approved alternative). In this study, you’ll examine several critical internal indicators that, when combined, paint a picture of your company. As appropriate, the data you’ll use for your report must be publicly available or subject to faculty assessment.
Requirements for Format
Use the Situation Audit Template supplied below to conduct your audit. Aside from a mandatory cover page, a brief executive summary, and a list of references, your Situation Audit report will have 15 to 20 pages double-spaced. For help writing this section, see Executive Summaries. Appendices can provide useful supplemental information, but they will not count toward the report’s page limit. References and in-text citations should be formatted in APA style.
Academic Integrity
Be sure to read the information supplied in the embedded links as you progress through the steps to completion—they’re all related to your project work. In whatever coursework you submit, cite any ideas you get from these materials. You will develop credibility in the minds of your readers and make your original concepts stand out if you credit the ideas of others in your writing.
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
—Sir Isaac Newton
Follow these guidelines now that you have an understanding of the project requirements:
Take a look at these quick tips for researching your company. Any restricting factors you may experience while writing this report should be discussed with your instructor. After discussing these issues with your instructor, if you decide you should examine an organization other than your own, please read this information about using an outside organization.
Schedule any meetings with your organization’s personnel in advance if necessary to collect the essential information.
Use the Situation Audit Template as your blueprint and guide for the full report, from beginning to end.
After that, move on to Step 2 and write an overview description of your company.
Step 2: Identify Significant Organizational Facts
To start, create an organizational fact sheet for your organization by writing a concise overview description that includes the following information:
- When and by whom was it founded?
- Organizational, legal forms and tax status
- The company’s current CEO
- It’s a particular industry or a group of industries
- its sizes
- Its main objective
Such overviews are usually limited to one page (approximately 250 to 300 words paragraph assignments).
Remember to approach your analysis from the standpoint of an independent consultant. Maintain as much objectivity as possible. Consider the report’s intended audience: key stakeholders like board members, new workers, and anyone who would benefit from this review.
After you’ve finished your overview description, move on to Step 3 to determine your organization’s mission, vision, values, and goals.
Step 3: Define your mission, vision, values, and objectives.
Turn your attention to your organization’s mission, vision, values, and goals now that you’ve established the main facts about it. These characteristics, when considered collectively, can assist drive organizational decisions, improve employee performance, and influence many of the other organizational components you’ll be looking at for this report.
The organization’s purpose, vision, values, and goals should be examined regularly to see whether any changes are essential in light of major environmental circumstances or changes in its performance or capabilities.
To examine your organization’s mission, vision, values, and goals, follow the steps below:
Find out your organization’s mission and how it has changed through time. What process, if any, caused the change?
Examine how well your business’s mission (1) is understood, (2) continues to inform critical choices, and (3) is connected with what the organization does.
Read deducing a mission if your organization doesn’t have a clear mission statement.
Examine your company’s vision and basic beliefs. Examine whether the organization’s vision and basic values are in sync with and supportive of its mission. Are the organization’s mission and basic principles well-understood and accepted?
Read Deducing Vision and Core Values if you can’t discover explicit declarations regarding your organization’s vision or core values.
Next, check to see if your company has a strategy for setting goals. Examine whether these objectives are clearly stated and make sense in light of the organization’s purpose, vision, and values. In other words, look for missions, values, and goals that are all in sync.
When you’ve finished Stage 3, drop your organizational overview and fact sheet, as well as your organization’s mission, vision, values, and goals, into dropbox in the last step of this project for review and feedback. After that, move on to Step 4.
Step 4: Examine the organization’s strategy and goals
While having a clear and well-understood mission and core goals, vision, and values is crucial, success is improbable without related activities directed by an organizational strategy with quantifiable targets.
A concise explanation of your organization’s strategy should be included in your audit. Remember that this report will help new employees get acquainted with the organization, so you don’t need to undertake a thorough study. In subsequent projects, you will have the opportunity to examine these features in greater depth.
While working on this section of your report, keep the following guidelines in mind:
Identify and evaluate your company’s organizational plan. This should be pretty straightforward to find for publicly traded organizations, but this may not be the case for the company where you work.
If possible, confirm the process for developing, reviewing, and revising these goals and who and how they contribute.
Include a preliminary assessment of how well you met your goals.
Cite the techniques and procedures you utilized to arrive at your conclusions, including the balanced scorecard and key performance indicators (KPIs).
When examining your organization’s strategy and objectives, as well as their consequences for performance, it’s helpful to examine strategic planning opponents who argue that very successful enterprises can occasionally arise from a series of unforeseen or unexpected activities. As a result, you’ll want to keep an eye out for indications that some of your company’s triumphs aren’t the result of a well-thought-out strategic planning process.
Then move on to Step 5, where you’ll look at different types of strategies and how to get a competitive advantage.
Step 5: Determine the Types of Strategies and Competitive Advantages
Now that you’ve evaluated your organization’s strategy and objectives, it’s time to critically evaluate the type(s) of strategies it employs and includes that analysis in your audit.
Corporate and Business Unit Strategies
Examine the many sorts of organizational strategies first. Then figure out which ones apply to your company.
The advantage in the Market
Even if your company is meeting its strategic and financial goals, its actions may not be resulting in a competitive advantage.
Try to figure out your company’s competitive advantage sources (if any) and give a rough estimate of how valuable these advantages are. Later in your MBA program, you’ll have the chance to dig further into a competitive advantage.
Also, check if you can identify your company’s main strengths and draw conclusions about whether and how they are utilized to gain a competitive advantage.
Continue to Step 6, which looks at organizational size and structure, after you’ve reviewed strategy types and competitive advantage.
Step 6: Determine the size and structure of the organization
Organizational size and structure, like strategy types and competitive advantage, have implications for achieving the organization’s purpose, vision, goals, and objectives (MVGOs).
Size of the Company
Examine the size of your company and see how much it has evolved in the last five years. Include a review of how your organization’s size affects its capacity to achieve its strategic goals in your audit.
