Why conducting such an analysis is key

One important step in the process of avoiding obstacles to change is figuring out what barriers might derail your progress. Barriers are those things that interrupt your goal of making a lasting change.

That’s why we suggest that before embarking on a change plan, it is essential to conduct a situation analysis. This comprehensive examination of your organisation, sector, and stakeholders provides a solid foundation for informed decision-making and successful implementation.

The key benefits of situation analysis are as follows:

Let’s map out your situation

So you need to know where you are now before mapping out where you would like to me. 

Starting with situation analysis helps you develop a good understanding of the issue you want to tackle, what you bring to the situation, and what might be the best course of action. 

There are many SWOT -Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats- frameworks out there and you and your organisation may already have one. If that’s the case, we simply encourage you to review and update it keeping in mind that you are aiming at implementing digital transformation.

In other words, the purpose of the exercise is actually with your club to ascertain the situation/context and the needs of the club which might be solved using a digital solution.

In a world where everything is changing so fast here are the main recommendations and advice we would give you to conduct this exercise:

1. Listen to people – Start with people in your team who are working on the same thing, then widen out to other stakeholders
2. Look out for informed data – widen your perspective. Closely examine what existing or new datasets and research are reporting.
3. Keep checking your assumptions

All this to say, this step is crucial and requires some time.

As an alternative to the traditional SWOT exercise, we suggest the Sailboat exercise. This will provide you with a solid yet fun start off for your situation analysis. Indeed it is fundamentally a process for gathering honest feedback from your team and stakeholders about the state of your team / service / organisation.

Guiding questions to complete this framework are as such:

• What’s holding us back? (Anchor)
• What’s helping us grow? (The wind)
• What external factors are we sticking our heads in the sand and not talking about? (The rocks)
• What’s been going well, or less wel (the Sails), and based on this – where do we head next? (the Island)

Topic materials & Resources to go further

Name of the material	Why it matters / What you will find
What is situational analysis 🔗	Developed by LucidSpark this article provides the background and key information of elements to be considered when conducting a situation analysis as part of strategic planning.  Interestingly, it also provides various frameworks to conduct a situation analysis.
Sailboat Exercice 🔗	Downloadable blank version for you to complete the exercice