As you go deeper, you will find plenty of approaches to planning. The technique or approach you take for your project, work, study or activity really depends on what your planning for. Sometimes you are planning for your life, isn’t it? Won’t be the same approach you use to plan for your class project. Which is why it’s good to know the different approaches so you use the one most apt for you. Using a perfect planning approach for yourself is up to your discretion.
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Approaches to Planning
SWOT Analysis
You must have heard this term over and over since your childhood where you identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to business competition or project planning.
The intention is to pinpoint the actual objectives of the business and identify all the internal and external factors that will affect this objective, both favorably and adversely.
In fact, SWOT is one of the most popular tools in planning. It involves asking and answering questions so we can generate useful data for each of the categories.
Strengths and weakness frequently internally-relate, while opportunities and threats commonly focus on the external environment. The name is an acronym for the below:
- S that stands for Strengths: qualities of the business or project that make
- W that stands for Weaknesses: qualities of the business that puts it at a disadvantage in any way
- O that stands for Opportunities: characteristics in the environment that the business or project might exploit to its advantage
- T that stands for Threats: characteristics in the environment that might cause trouble for the business.
We use A SWOT analysis in pre-crisis planning and preventive crisis management.
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PEST Analysis
PEST analysis (political, economic, socio-cultural and technological)is a largely used method of Planning.
PESTLE is an integral part of the external analysis done for strategy analysis or market research. It takes into consideration macroeconomic factors and gives us a general overview. It can help identify potential market growth or decline
Variants that build on the PEST framework include:
- PESTEL or PESTLE, with the addition of legal and environmental factors. Popular in the UK.
- SLEPT, further adding legal factors.
- STEPE, with added ecological factors.
- STEEPLE and STEEPLED, adding ethics and demographic factors.
- DESTEP, adding demographic and ecological factors.
- SPELIT, adding legal and intercultural factors, popular in the United States since the mid-2000s.
- And finally there is STEER, which looks at the sociocultural, technological, economic, ecological, and regulatory factors, but does not specifically include political factors in its analysis.
Usually, these two approaches work for planning anything and everything but you must make some adjustments and modify these to your own fitting.
Questions on Approaches to Planning
- What does PEST stand for?
Answer: PEST analysis stands for political, economic, socio-cultural and technological analysis.
