Since it was brought to the forefront of business planning by Albert Humphrey in the late 1960s, the SWOT analysis has been relied upon by corporations, small businesses, nonprofits, and even schools to make key decisions and form strategies. This planning tool in which you measure your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats can be beneficial, but often, organizations rely too heavily on this method while not performing it correctly or without recognizing its weaknesses. Our strategic planning firm in Minneapolis is providing a closer look at whether you should perform a SWOT analysis on your organization and, if so, how to avoid common pitfalls.

Most people associate Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) with highly specialized or regimented organizations, such as hospitals, research facilities, government agencies, or the military. However, these are not just for complex organizations, and are highly valuable for even minor areas and tasks (Biologic Technical Applications, 2012). To help you create and apply SOPs to your organization, our strategic planning agency in Minneapolis is sharing the steps on getting started.

While the past year showed how school districts could rise to the challenges of helping students access remote learning, studies are showing that it simply wasn’t as effective as learning in a classroom setting (Chen, Dorn, Sarakatsannis, and Wiesinger, 2021). We know that learning gains and knowledge retention is significantly reduced for students in remote learning settings, and while the full extent isn’t known yet, research indicates that students may return with fewer than 50 percent of the learning gain in math and 70 percent in reading compared to a typical school year (Kuhlfeld and Tarasawa, 2020).