The process of strategic management can be grouped into three phases based on different activities. These phases or stages are: strategic analysis, strategic decision and implementation of the strategy.
To realize the strategy of your business you can start with any of the phases because they are interrelated with each other. 80% of errors are committed, as normal, in the implementation phase.
Below we describe the general characteristics of strategic analysis
It could be seen as the starting point of the strategic process that costs three phases:
– Analysis and establishment of business objectives
– Carry out the external or environmental analysis
– Carry out the internal analysis of the business
Analysis and establishment of business objectives
The first step that every business should take is to clarify what its goals and objectives are to give coherence to all its activity. In this way, once the objectives are finalized, all the actions and efforts of the business can be directed towards achieving them.
Likewise, it could happen that the same company proposes several objectives. In this case, it is necessary to value them and establish a hierarchy of them. Thus, in the case of not being able to reach all the proposed objectives, efforts will be directed towards achieving the most important ones.
Carry out the external or environmental analysis
It consists of studying the environment in which the activity of the business will be developed. In this strategic analysis, not only the study of the characteristics of the environment is included, but also the analysis of the sector’s competitors.
This information is essential to carry out the identification of the threats and opportunities that characterize the company’s environment. From this analysis, two types of environment can be distinguished:
General environmentÂ
It refers to the demographic, technological and economic components of the environment
Specific or competitive environmentÂ
It is composed of competing businesses that can threaten our strategy, so:
- Perform the internal analysis of the business
- The strengths and weaknesses of the business
The internal analysis consists of finding out and analyzing the most important strengths and weaknesses of the business in order to generate and maintain competitive advantages as long as possible
This analysis includes the study of all the resources that the business has, both tangible and intangible, paying greater attention to the management of intangibles since today it is what can provide us with competitive advantages.
