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Vesa Purho
Development Manager, Nokia
Many of us are familiar with SWOT analysis used in strategic
planning to chart the Strengths and Weaknesses of an
organisation and the Opportunities and Threats coming from
outside the organisation. Another often used tool for
charting the environment of an organisation is PEST, or
STEP, or sometimes even PESTLE. Although originally intended
for describing the macro environment of an organisation,
PEST can also be used in a smaller scale to analyse the
environment of a documentation group inside a company. Here
is a short introduction to the model and how it can be used.
As you might have already guessed, like SWOT, PEST is an
cronym for describing the Political, Economical,
Sociocultural, and Technological factors in your work
environment. In the longer form, PESTLE, the "L" stands for
Legal and the "E" for Ecological. In the shorter form, the
legal and ecological factors can be included in the
sociocultural analysis. So an organisation, in this case a
documentation department, can analyse its operating
environment based on the four PEST factors.
When thinking about the political situation, you should
analyse the position of the documentation department in
relation to other departments. Is the documentation
department recognised as an important function and given the
needed responsibility and authority, or does it need to
fight for its existence? Who are the major stakeholders that
can influence the responsibility and authority of the
department, and how can you affect those stakeholders? What
is the political atmosphere in the company? Is there a lot
of power-play and elbow tactics going on, or is there open
communication and respect?
The economical situation is naturally about money. Do you
have money to spend on development activities, or should you
just concentrate on getting documents done? What is the
economical situation in the company, and how can that affect
your department? Who controls the budget and how; what are
your possibilities in influencing the budget? Are there some
places where you could save money by improving your
processes and interfaces?
Sociocultural aspects involve the people and the working
conditions. How do the people work together in the
documentation team and with others involved in creating
documentation, like SMEs? What are the personality types in
your team, and how do they work together and complement each
other; do their personality types match the job
requirements? Do you work in a multicultural team, and how
has that affected communication; do the team members
understand the differences between the cultures? If you are
using contractors or have outsourced part of your
documentation, how effective is the relationship between the
people in-house and those outside the company? If you work
in a multinational company, what are the legal aspects
related to your work that you should be aware of when making
global decisions?
Last, the technological factors relate to the tools you use
in your work. What tools are you using, and what are the
problems with them? What kind of development needs do you
have, and do you have the resources to implement them? Do
you have multiple tools used by different teams, and what
does that mean for the overall efficiency? How do the
writers and project managers feel about the tools?
After doing the current-state analysis, hopefully with the
help of your team members and representatives from the
stakeholders, you need to describe where you would like to
be in each area and make an action plan for getting there.
You can also combine the PEST analysis with SWOT so that you
analyse each part of the SWOT with PEST. What are your
political, economical, sociocultural, and technological
strengths?
This article is the personal opinion of the author and does
not necessarily reflect the opinion or practice of Nokia.
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