Dear Bob ... I would like to ask a short follow up to your "Strategic Planning" question in this week's Advice Line. It's timely because I've been asked to lead our small company's strategic planning exercise and I think SWOT is a great framework. Your suggestion to do the analysis in conjunction with our business model seems like the missing piece to make sure we end up with something tang Dear Bob … I would like to ask a short follow up to your “Strategic Planning” question in this week’s Advice Line. It’s timely because I’ve been asked to lead our small company’s strategic planning exercise and I think SWOT is a great framework. Your suggestion to do the analysis in conjunction with our business model seems like the missing piece to make sure we end up with something tangible and valuable at the end. But …I can visualize the “swim lanes” you talk about in the third paragraph. But I am a bit lost about the columns. Are we flowcharting our business process? If so, do we incorporate the customer’s decision making process at all? I would appreciate any quick advice you can offer. Thanks.Scott– Bob Dear Scott …Before I begin, thanks for giving me the opportunity for a clarification. Several readers asked what SWOT stands for in the first place. It’s “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats,” for anyone who wasn’t able to puzzle it out from context.Now, to your inquiry: Ah, the columns. A great question, which means, of course, that all I have is a not-so-great answer. If you want to master the swimlane technique for process re-engineering, the formal name is “Rummler-Brache diagrams” and you can find resources far more knowledgeable than me to provide guidance. With that caveat in place, here’s what has worked for me, which should be more than sufficient for use in strategic planning.The first key to success in this technique is to make sure time always goes from left to right. In fact, you should try to avoid depicting any loop-backs, as they clutter the diagram and make it harder to understand.The second key to success is ease of understanding – swimlane diagrams are useful for two reasons: First, they establish both roles and process in a single depiction, and that’s important enough; but just as important, a good swimlane diagram is easy to interpret. Which gets us to the answer to the column question. In general, each column represents a process step – a state transition, if you like. You don’t have to be slavish about this – you can have a transition or two from role to role happen within a column to save space – but for the most part, spread things out to make it easier to follow the flow.Do you include your customer’s decision-making process? Only if you might encounter threats or opportunities there, which is to say, you bet you do! In fact, for most companies I recommend making “Customer” the top swimlane, starting everything with the customer’s recognition of need – something many sales professionals find difficult to accept at first in these exercises, as they think the business model starts with a sales call.(A subtlety here: The starting point might not start with the customer’s recognition of need for product and services – it might start with the customers’ recognition that they need to have pre-established relationships with major suppliers, so that when there is a need for the actual products, they know who to call.) Another, related point: Don’t limit the list of roles to human beings. In many industries, the company website, and perhaps an EDI interface should be included. Which is to say, when appropriate you can treat information technology, manufacturing technology and so forth as robots in the process, which makes it much easier for a company’s business leaders to discover that part of the customer process is visiting their website and their competitors’ websites, and that while some of their competitors are now publishing their full catalog on-line, providing price quotations in real-time, and accepting orders either on-line or through an EDI interface, their website is dull brochureware – a Threat.Last bit of advice: Don’t be too thorough in your depiction of roles, at least at first. Keep this at a high level, which means you might, for example, represent your entire delivery capability as a single row titled “Company internal processes.” The point of the exercise is to understand the buttons and levers the company can push and pull to drive business success, not to have a perfect scale model of the entire enterprise and its marketplace.– Bob ——– Technology Industry