SWOT Analyses Part 1

Today in our business class, we were asked to do a swot analyses of a school. I will only talk about one part of this swot analyses because we haven’t talked about the 7S matrix that forms the SW (strengths and weaknesses) of a business.

QUESTION :Identify steeple factors for the opportunity and threats for a school.

The Koc School

Social

 It can be both an opportunity and a threat.

Opportunity:  The koc school is a prestigious school and the parents backgrounds are high standard. They have sufficient incomes opposed to the workers in a factory.

To convert threats into opportunities, and improve the opportunities, the koc school can help educate the families in the east and try change their ideologies.  Also the school can organize educational seminars knowledge and awareness.

Technological

It can both be considered as an opportunity and a threat.

Threat: If the school stores all its important important in computer system ,if a system failure occurs, all the  data base could be destroyed. There is also a change of the school network being hacked.

Opportunity: In the Koc school there are special student websites like moodle, naviance and personal page in order to keep students updated about their grades and organize them.  These websites provide easy and fast access which can allow time to be used efficientle.

Special codes and passwords are given to parents to inform them about their children.

Kocscholl should store its data also in other hard disks and improve the security systems by obligating password change every few months. Moreover the access duration should be increased in order to prevent students from being interrupted.

 Mr Sen told us : Be carefull, STEEPLE IS A TOOL USED TO MEASURE THE CURRENT ENVIRONMENT NOT THE HYPOTHETICAL SENERIO. He also said remember, Social factors include demographic factor.

business Lesson 18.10.2010

Today, we had our first business quiz. It contained 5 questions that Mr. Sen wrote on the board.  Below are the notes I took on the answers we discussed in class.

The service sectors of an economy can be considered as the tertiary and quarternary sector.  The service that the quaternary sector provides to consumers isn’t related to the process of using natural goods. Google is an example of a business in the  quaternary sector.

The service sector (tertiary sector) is related to a process from bringing a product to customer.

The mission of a business can be defined as providing the needs and wants of people.  The mission is clarified in the mission statement of a business. The mission must also answers the question  ‘why do we exist?’ for a business.

A business should take action according to the external factors. External factors are essential in planning actions.  One can only look ahead and decide what he will do if he knows where the business is now. 

After we discussed our quiz answers we were introduced to a new topic called SWOT. At first this term was unfamiliar but then, as we talked more about this term, we noticed that it actually contained the external factors of a business ( STEEPLE ) that we had already went over.

Basicly  for business and non business organizations

7S+ STEEPLE = SWOT   There are SWOT= strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

7s is internal, Steeple is external factors that affect a business or non business organization.

The external environment is divided into STEEPLE. 

In order not to mix these two different “factor groups” for a business or non business organization we should know that The 7s matrix tells one where his strengths and weaknesses come from and The steeple analysis tells one about opportunities or threats.

All the negative things in an environment can be considered as threats. Opportunities are positive.

In further detail, Swot analyses is the analyses of where businesses are now. It is the first step in planning.  Planning is essential for a business to continue functioning. Planning containes the four main questions below;

1-where we are now,  ( swot is the technique to identify the first question)'

2-where do we want to be at a particular time in the future,  (objectives, targets, goals are used to answer this question)

3-what should we do to get where we want to be,  (strategy is needed for this question to be understood and fulfilled)

4-how do we know we are getting there? ( control is used to verify the firm is getting closer to its goals )  ( this question can sometimes be defined separate from planning ) 

Time x =  the Horizon should always be considered when planning, answering the questions above.

For example : if you want to walk to Ankara : how far are you from Ankara now, when will you get to Ankara, how will you get to Ankara? can be considered as your planning.

Business Lesson 15.10.2010

Sooooo Mr. Sen said: Let's get down to business.


Our first question was " What is STEEPLE "? 
Nobody in the class could remember.  


Even though steeple 's dictionary definition is a church tower and spire.
• a spire on the top of a church tower or roof.• archaic a tall tower of a church or other building.   when considered as a business term it means different factors that may affect a business in different ways.  The S stands for Social and cultural opportunities , T stands for Technological opportunities , E stands for Economic opportunities, the second E stand for ethical, P for Political opportunities , L for Legal opportunities and the final E stands for environmental factors that may affect a business. The importance of each of these and different factors and their possible threats may cause a lot of different changes in a business. All of these factors need to be considered through-outly in order for the business to have a long and healthy working period.
Certain examples for each of these factors are below:

Socially, Gazi Osman Pasa and the Koc School have different students with different family backgrounds.

One of the social factors in a school are the expectations parents have for their children because the school has a certain reputation.

What is the demographic profile of the families of the children in a certain school ?   could also be a social investigation to be held. Also suppose that the ministry decides that Jewish people can’t go to school. Then that would be a social change in the schools students.

Social and Economic factors were misunderstood between our classmates. So how do you distinguish a social and economic factor?

Social factors have to do with ethnic identities with religion with social class with democracy and with occupations.  Economic factors are the factors related to economy and cash and income and so on.

Some Economic Factor examples are:  Turkey -2001 – a lot of parents woke up one day and say that they no asserts left due to the crisis . This is an economic factor that negatively affected families. Another example is if The dollar goes very week it can be a good thing for imports. If your company has a loan of 1 million dollars and if dollar weakens it is a good thing, you will pay the same amount but it will mean less value.Economic factors, like all other factors that affect a business can either hurt you of be to your benefit. It depends on the aspect you look at.

Political changes can be related to the ideologies of people and the government. For example according to the ideologies of children and their parents, in a certain school, the school may need to change its certain aspects of perhaps certain classes.  In our country(and many others) politics and education has never been separate. The programs of the ministry of education are always interrelated with the political issues. And we can clearly see that politics interferes with education.

A little business everywhere...

Two days ago in our business class with Mr. Sen, we talked about business organizations and non business organizations. We discussed how everything in life resembled these organizations in ways like their functions ( to provide customers with their need and wants is the purpose of business organizations when  a mother works to provide her child with food and toys ), their labour division ( a mom managing the money in a family while the father works ) and so on.
Today in our Environmental Systems, science class, we were talking about the terms NPP and GPP that are related to the net productivity and the general productivity of a producer in a certain food chain. ( these terms can be easily comprehended when a plant and the amount of it's photosynthesis is examined ). At first I couldn't understand the relationship between these two terms so my teacher explained it once more and wrote down the formula: GPP = NPP + rate   
When I still couldn't get it he asked me if I took Business. I replied yes. Then he said : GPP is the price you sell your product for. Rate is the value added and when you subtract rate from GPP you get the costs of your inputs. Now understand? I replied once more: YES

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Business Lesson 4.10.2010

 Our first two periods today were business. We continued going over our past assignments in order to learn from our mistakes. We went over several different points of businesses. My class notes and the main points of the discussions held in class are below 

SYSTEM: we use the words system to describe a collection of certain things.

Qualified: having the ability to do something, it doesn’t mean –kaliteli-

Profit is not the main purpose of a business but it is essential for them to keep going on.

Expense: example: giving allowances to laborers.

In the long run!!

Businesses often need to make a distingsion about what is happening in the short run and what will happen in the long run.

Scanning the market and finding an opportunity that fits your skills

Not only your skills, the ones that you are able to reach

The skills a leader has to have

Creativity is about spotting an opportunity in a business.

In the long run one must have discipline and patience. As important as money are people

Inventory: the stock of stuff one has.

If you know the purpose of a business you know the reason for its existence.  The purpose should always define the big picture. You may live your daily life in the small picture but you should never loose sight in the big picture.

Too  much specialization in your own field isn’t good

DEPARTMENTS:

You have departments because you have specialized functions.

The bigger a company gets, the more specialization occurs that results in more departments.

Specialism has something to do with scale-size

Large scale organization can often employ specialists because they find it cheeper, this also results in more departments because things can be run more organized with the departments.

You don’t need departments to run a family but koc school has to have a financial department.

Business Lesson 1.10.2010

       After two weeks, Mr. Sen was back today. It was a bit exciting to properly meet him. I understood that he is like a university teacher, trying to push everybody in class to think. 
We went over some miss consumptions that we did in our previous assignments. We started with the comparison of profit and non profit organizations. We choose one of the groups(ours) assignment and went over it. 


My class notes are below:


Specialization : What is the Mercedes Benz company's specialization?
 The company doesn't specialize on only cars it specializes on trucks, cars, motorcycles and more.
Mr. sen pointed out that specialization isn't only something to do with products but it can also be in the form of a service. For example the teachers that work in a school. they provide us with the 'learning service'.
  If a company has specialized laborers the rate of productivity will increase but also this will have negative affects like the laborers getting bored of doing the same things everyday. "and believe me, you don't want a bored laborer" said Mr. Sen. Another negative affect might be the inflexibility of laborers.


 Efficiency is the same thing with productivity (!!!) and it is measured by dividing the outputs to the inputs. These measures can be different, it will still make sense.


What is quality? we were asked and there were a lot of different definitions from the class. At the end of the lesson I understood that quality is very hard to measure because it is subjective. In order to measure and compare quality, one has to have many different criterias.