Once you have identified and prioritized your SWOT results, you can use them to develop short-term and long-term strategies for your business. After all, the true value of this exercise is in using the results to maximize the positive influences on your business and minimize the negative ones. But how do you turn your SWOT results into strategies? One way to do this is to consider how your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats overlap with each other. This is sometimes called a TOWS analysis.

For example, look at the strengths you identified, and then come up with ways to use those strengths to maximize the opportunities (these are strength-opportunity strategies). Then, look at how those same strengths can be used to minimize the threats you identified (these are strength-threats strategies).

Continuing this process, use the opportunities you identified to develop strategies that will minimize the weaknesses (weakness-opportunity strategies) or avoid the threats (weakness-threats strategies).

How often do you think organizations perform a formal analysis of their resources and capabilities? Provide a rationale for your opinion.

Most organizations perform this kind of analysis on a yearly basis. However, I strongly believe they should be perform every quarter (4 month) and this is because if you wait until the end of the year to review what you have done, the resources use and measure the capability of the employees it is too late to fix any problem that you detect. But, if you perform this reviews you would be able to make the necessary changes on the organization to reach an specific goal. You can also reward the department that is doing right and penalize who is been left behind.