SWOT analysis in the IT field

Definition

The fastest and simplest analysis that you can make on a team or organization to identify exactly what the SWOT acronym stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats

“SWOT analysis is a decision-making technique that identifies the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of an organization or project.” by Wikipedia

SWOT Analysis image.

Still don’t get it. What’s this SWOT again?

Let’s take them one by one and slowly you’ll get it.

1. Strengths

If you think about an organization, each one of them was built based on some core values or at least some principles or guidelines that are written somewhere and create the strengths that the company can use as leverage in different negotiations.

When we are talking about a team, the same things are applicable, the only difference is that it’s on a smaller scale.

Examples of what I am talking about here. You can think about the next things as strengths of an organization:

• Strong cybersecurity department
• Very good analytics capabilities (fast and well-crafted results)
• Agile project management approaches

And for the team

• Technical expertise — have in the team experts from different areas ( like cybersecurity, cloud and so on) that work well together and all of them have deep knowledge in writing code.
• Performing phase— Already worked together before and they are in the performing phase
• Experience — worked on a similar project
• Strong leadership — about this I probably could write a book to explain what this actually means, but most likely you get it.

2. Weaknesses

Usually, this can be translated as areas in which the organization or team is underperforming.

Organization

• Outdated hardware or software.
• Slow processes — Everything takes a lifetime to be changed. Probably you heard at least 3–4 times in your life, someone saying that he has been working for that company for XY years and nothing changed.
• Limited budget or resources
• Poor (or no) integration or communication between the business and the development teams (this is usually one of the biggest issues of our century)
• Security vulnerability or security being ignored in general (because of a lack of knowledge but can be also because of low motivation).

Team

• Skill gaps — people don’t know stuff, and there is no “teacher”. The problem appears when the organization can’t get a “teacher” at least part-time in the team.
• Limited resources — No time for quality, not enough people to do things properly etc.
• Poor communication — yes, it is a problem when people from the same team don’t communicate; and communication doesn’t mean talking to each other. Communication is a little bit more than that! And if they actually communicate between themselves, the poor communication can be with the business people, stakeholders and so on.

3. Opportunities

For organizations what I saw so far as a “trend”, is that a high-level manager or board member goes to a conference, sees some presentations and after that tries to implement “digital transformation” or digitalization of their processes.
Another thing that I saw lately, is that everyone wants to integrate AI, without knowing what AI really is or what GPTs are in general (small hint from Google: “Generative Pre-trained Transformer”).

For teams, it’s a little bit simple to give examples:

• Technology improvements — use technologies that help the team to be way faster, productive and bring improvements to the project as well.
• Training — “level up” the team member’s skills
• Support from the upper management — work on the project which has an unlimited budget. Believe me, it’s amazing!

4. Threats

For organizations, there are so many, that I don’t even know where to start, so I’ll give you more examples regarding the team because here it can be a little bit more tricky

• Fast-changing technology — the tech stack is changing so fast, and the team require constant adaptation that it might be exhausting for the team. Without strong leadership, people might leave.
• Not clear (or fast-changing) requirements — you can imagine that will happen, right?
• Security risk — a project can kill a company. If it doesn’t really kill it, it will hurt it badly for sure. Blood will be spilt.
• Rules or compliance issues that may randomly appear — think about a project in which no one knew about GDPR. You may say that everyone knows about it, well…believe me, they don’t. I’ve seen it with my own 2 eyes!

How to do it?

Problem: Let’s say you’re a new lead (team lead, manager, don't care) and you want to do this.
Problem details: Keep in mind that you’re a new lead, so you don’t know the team
Solution: It will be hard for sure, and there is not a clear guide, but I’ll create for you a list of things that I would do:

1. Information Gathering — or in more simple words: assessing the current situation. How bad is it? Gather as much information as you can, about the team, the project, the organization, even God! Active listening is the key. Write down everything and after that create categories and filter the nonsense out of it.
   Ways to do this
   a) One-to-one meetings — I won’t give details on this, since I already wrote so much on the topic and I don’t want to repeat myself or bore you to death.
   b) Review past performance — check how the team performed on the last project, sprint, and period. Analyze the feedback they got, their achievements, challenges they faced and lessons they learned.
   c) Talk to stakeholders, managers or other teams— check how people around them see those guys.
2. Start with S. Identify strengths — Check what things drive those guys, push them to deliver and make a success out of that project.
   a) Skills and Experience — In the one-to-one find out everyone’s skills, and unique expertise and find out the “key players”. This way you’ll find out who are the strong performers also, and strong performers don’t need to be only on coding. Someone can be the “glue” of the team. He doesn’t do much, but without him, the team behaves like a chicken without its head. (Check the problem solving skills, creativity but also interpersonal skills of each individual)
   b) Team culture — strong collaboration? one-man show? culture of knowledge sharing? Each of them can be very good or very bad in some situations.
3. Weaknesses — Understand the team's problems and needs
   a) Get involved and really listen
   b) Skill Gaps — without being judgy uncover what skills you are missing in that team.
   c) Lack of resources — does the team have enough capacity? How’s the morale? Is there any burnout risk?
   d) Communication issues?
   e) Inefficient processes, workflows or bottlenecks in general — An example can be that everyone needs to approve a code before the merge will be done, or no CI/CD, or automation in general
4. Opportunities — Everyone is in charge of his own career, but you, as a lead should promote and help people from your team to evolve.
   a) Push for a feedback culture
   b) Push for a knowledge-sharing culture
   c) Bring someone to mentor them for a period of time, or at least send them to some workshops to do code challenges together but not project-related.
5. Analyze threats
   a) Project and team analysis — Always know what’s happening within your team; what’s the competition doing, and how’s the project going, especially with the team members. You need to always know when someone is thinking of quitting, have a backup plan if someone leaves, know who will also leave, who will be demotivated, what knowledge gaps will appear, how the retention rate will be affected, does someone cares about it or not, how the career plans of the other team members will be affected and so on.
   b) Analyze expectations — if they are unrealistic or not, what will happen if the team will miss the deadline, etc
   c) If the technology is evolving so fast and you always need to invest in “upgrades”, is it worth it, or is it the correct tech stack to work with?

Yeah yeah yeah, and now what?

After you make the SWOT analysis my suggestion is to create an actionable plan list. You know the threats, so you know what to prepare against and mitigate fast (cut the snake’s head before it bites); you know the weaknesses so you can address them, you know the strengths so you can leverage them, you know the opportunities, or do you? If you don’t, ignore this for the moment, because while you will write your list, opportunities will just pop out.

My suggestion is to do a training plan. I don’t know anyone who won’t join a workshop or a presentation and would rather work on his project. Think about a “skill-building” direction. Do different workshops and presentations, see and find out who has a passion for what and invest in that person until he becomes an expert. At that moment you’ll get a “go-to person” and a key player in your organization. Yeah, probably you’ll pay him a lot, probably all the “lessons” you sent him will cost a lot, but most likely will be way less than hiring a new guy with his experience and knowledge.

Team-building — I said it more than once. X people together don’t form a team. Build yourself a team that can manage and create anything.

Project risk management — really have realistic expectations, plans, and as clear requirements as you can, and be transparent in front of the team with the things that you don’t know and just want to try out.

Resource allocation — optimize tools, processes and so on as much as you can and with the remaining budget invent in the team.

Why SWOT?

Pros:

• Simple — It’s easy to apply.
• Broad Perspective — you see both internal and external factors that affect the team.
• Action Oriented — If you create a list of all those things it’s natural to think about an actionable plan.
• Easy to be done by new leaders — you don’t need experience as a leader to do it and it also encourages you to strategic thinking.

Cons:

• Broad Scope — Most of the time it gives you too general answers, and you will need to dig way deeper to find out team dynamics or specific interpersonal issues between team members. Let’s say that using this you’ll find out the problem, but not also the root cause of it. One technique to find out the root cause you can find it in another article that I wrote which is here.
• “Static snapshots” — The result is from now. It’s the result of the team or organization at this moment. In 2 weeks if you perform the analysis it most likely be different. How much different, it depends from team to team and organization to organization.
• Bias — It relies on one-two-one meetings in general, which means subjectivity, and personal perception. If you don’t get the full picture or if you have limited context you might get into some assumptions that are not truly correct.

Conclusion

As already said at the beginning of this article, this is the fastest and simplest analysis that you can make on a team, to understand its strengths and limitations and get the “landscape quickly”.
We all know 2 teams are not the same, and probably even if you only change one team member from a team, that team will not be and behave the same, so, this is a very good technique to adopt as a lead.