Guide to Strategic Planning: Environmental Analysis – The Rhode Island Welcome Back Center
In this guide, we have introduced the organization to help think about future direction. Also, we discussed the importance of preparing to plan. Therefore, the environmental assessment sets the tone for strategic planning (Zuckerman, 2016). In this section of the guide, the RIWBC board will start to think about the critical question that addresses the internal and external capacities that the organization must be successful when planning strategically. In essence, this process is known as environmental scanning, which entails systematically interpreting data that reveals external opportunities and threats and internal strengths and weaknesses (Society for Human Resource Management [SHRM], n.d.). With this information, the RI Welcome Back Center can change its strategies and plans to meet those needs when appropriate (SHRM,…show more content… The first output represents the competitive advantages and disadvantages of the RI Welcome Back Center. Typically, this is represented with a SWOT Table (Figure 1) or more recently, some organizations are using SOAR (Figure 2). According to Babatunde & Adebisis (2012), the SWOT analysis provides information that is helpful in matching the firm's resources and capabilities to the competitive environment in which it operates. As such, it is instrumental in strategy formulation and selection (Babatunde & Adebisis, 2012). On the other hand, the SOAR methodology starts with a strategic investigation to discover the organization’s greatest strengths and opportunities and encourage participants to share aspirations of their preferred future (Starvos, Cooperrider, and Kelley, 2003). With these expectations in mind, “recognition and reward programs are designed to inspire employees to achieve measurable results” (Starvos, Cooperrider, and Kelley,
