ENVIRONMENTAL ANALYSIS

Environmental Analysis



Environmental Analysis

Introduction

The environmental analysis facilitate business managers in discovering out strengths and weaknesses, opportunities, and constraints based on internal and external factors which are aptly named and taken from an environment. Additional analysis aid managers in determining purpose and contingencies that will either assist or prevent mission and program accomplishments, from this analysis, positives changes will be made compensating for constraints while building and strengthening on opportunities that will off-set weaknesses. According to Reich (1997) the goal of the environmental analysis is to allow the firm to locate the opportunities that the firm should attempt to take advantage of.

According to Gilley (1998) the internal environmental analysis considers the organization's financial condition, managerial abilities, attitudes, facilities, staffing size, staffing quality, competitive position, image, and structure. It's an analysis that allows view of our own internal situation while the external analysis takes into considerations economic conditions of the organization. It also extends studies to other areas such legal, politics, socio-cultural values, the state of technologies, and availability and the competitive of resources in reference to the organizational structure.

The best way to approach environmental analysis (internal) is through a series of assessment steps that will assist in identifying several components of an internal environmental analysis. This assessment will be used to recognize strengths and weaknesses or the business in reference to the aforementioned topics. Whereas the same approach will be taken with the external environmental analysis considering factors as economic state of the business, legal, political issues, socio-cultural values, technology situation, resource availability, competitiveness, and the organizational structure. The fact is that an exhausting assessment of both the internal and external environments will aid in determining strengths and weaknesses. According to Gilley (1998) each of these variables can affect your efforts to accomplish the mission; with the same token these same variables can become threats that may contain a possibility to negatively influence a business future. The environmental analysis also lends itself to seek out opportunities (commonly known as trends).

An opportunity is an incident or tendency that represents a probability and possibility for the business to boost its competitive position. Anything that would have a positive effect on the business represents an opportunity and it could also be a threat. For example in reference to the power tool maker, if they have taken advantage of an opportunity they saw based on their environmental analysis and in turn their annual sales ...