Even the simplest strategic direction I've decided so far - wearing my previous hat as business manager, specifically as CEO, has involved at least a business plan - for the bigger decisions - to a forecast and a detailed note, with tables and figures carefully annotated to indicate the sources and their authenticity.
Believe me, it works. Even a dumbed-down crude version works. Point to remember: work with cash and cash flow not with profits.
Joe Sahib I am not able to articulate my point well enough because I am not talking about what you're answering my questions with !
I am not saying that business managers go about without detailed business plans and that business intuition here is merely a whim. I have studied and practiced enough performance management to know that isn't the case by a long shot and the cash flow is indeed king. I know that budgets are important, as are performance targets, forecasts and financial and non financial indicators to gauge that performance - I know that.....I've done that.
What I was trying to get at it was the business analysis side of it using these models. My impression is that they are not applied in practice with nearly the amount of sense and proportion that they are when analyzing case studies. Naturally when you're thinking of expanding your business you're talking about the challenges you're going to face, where your own strengths are going to lie, what weaknesses you're going to guard against and what possible opportunities would this engagement throw at you.
Briefly a SWOT analysis is what, in my opinion, most business analysis decisions revolve around and it maybe as shallow and as deep as one may want it to be. Likewise it maybe as localized or as expanded as one desires it to be.
I just don't think that Business Managers go about drawing up matrices and elaborate models to figure this stuff out; more or less a SWOT coupled with forecasts, budgets and departmental input does that for them.
They may well be conducting a Porter's 5 Forces analysis or a Value Chain analysis inadvertently but my impression is that these are not conducted as stand-alone conscious exercises but simply something that gets covered in the larger SWOT portion of things.