What is an Organizational Analysis?
Organizational Analysis (OA) is the process of assessing the development, employees, activities and environment of an organisation.
What is an Organizational Analysis?
Organizational Analysis (OA) is the process of assessing the development, employees, activities and environment of an organisation.
Conducting an Organisational Analysis is extremely important as it helps identify a company’s strengths and weaknesses. Once identified, appropriate action can be taken to resolve or prevent problems.
The main focus of OA is on the assessment of the structure and design of an organisation, as well as its positioning and the efficiency with which the organisation operates.
As many internal and external factors as possible are taken into account during the assessment. The use of theoretical models can help organise the information that is obtained during an organisational analysis.
It also helps to discern correlations and root causes in this vast amount of information.
There are several popular OA models and theories. The SWOT model is the most well known. The SWOT model evaluates the strengths, weaknesses, possibilities and threats within organisations.
The McKinsey 7S Model is often used as well. This model focusses on balancing the seven most important characteristics of a company, unit or project. Frederick Taylor developed the rational model. His standpoint was that organisations had to be as efficient and mechanical as possible. The principles he derived from his research were of great importance to many companies, such as for, example, the Ford Motor Company.
Socio-technical models view companies from an infrastructural perspective. The key factor in this are the company’s surroundings. Other examples of organizational analysis models are:
Besides the OA models mentioned above, there are also some tools and frameworks which organisations can use to support the analysis. A good example of this is the PESTLE model. This tool is a technique and framework for assessing the various external influences on a company or situation. Porter’s Five Forces is a framework used to analyse the five main factors that influence competition.
Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) is a method used to study communication within an organisation and to reveal an invisible pattern of information flows and collaborations. This method is applied by mapping out the relationships between people, tasks, knowledge and resources of entire organisational systems.
Afterwards, the data produced during the process is analysed with special software to discover relationships, clusters and other actors.
The articles linked to the organizational analysis tag are about various methods, techniques, models and frameworks which support the analysis. How can I use organisational analysis methods in my own company? How do I use the SWOT model in practice? Which theories and methods are still relevant in today’s business environment?
