MOST Analysis provides a roadmap to companies and gives them a sense of purpose and capability. Learn how to conduct MOST analysis with an example.
Your business plan is your mantra for success. It will help you run the company, and it will inform a lot of the decisions that you make along the way. Your business plan should outline all of your goals, both short-term and long-term.
Your business plan should also cover how you will achieve these goals. It needs to focus on solid financial projections and a timeline for each goal to be achieved to meet those financial projections.
What if I tell you that a business tool exists that constructs a business plan for businesses in the most structured way? It creates a business plan that includes the company's mission, objectives, strategies, and tactics to carry out the missions successfully.
Today we will discuss an essential tool called the MOST Analysis that provides a roadmap to companies and gives them a sense of purpose and capability.
Every other company is bound to use the MOST analysis to sort out its direction by identifying its mission and objectives. The analysis also helps formulate appropriate strategies and tactics to achieve the goals.
You guys must be thinking about why this analysis is named "MOST analysis"; well today we will solve this mystery for you.
"MOST" is an acronym for mission, objectives, strategies, and tactics. This business tool is responsible for analyzing the internal environment of a company by analyzing all four factors within the company.
The MOST analysis is highly effective in helping you realize your business's potential. These well-tailored insights help you create an integrated business model that will enable you to reach your goals in a planned manner.
Now let's proceed further and learn in detail why it is essential to use MOST analysis in business operations.
Significance of Using MOST Analysis
After gaining some insight about the MOST analysis, we will discuss why to use this business tool to make your operations run smoothly.
Helps in Forming a Business Plan
A business plan is essential for a business as it provides a pathway to the business. Therefore, MOST analysis is considered a very well-structured business tool that helps in forming the business plan of a business.
With this tool's help, businesses can state the business's mission, objectives, strategies, and tactics. Stating them helps cover a significant part of the business plan.
Helps in Avoiding Conflicts
As we have discussed earlier, the MOST analysis provides a pathway to businesses. This helps in avoiding day-to-day conflicts that arise due to differences of opinion.
The findings of the MOST analysis unite the workforce to achieve the desired mission and objectives through specific strategies and tactics.
How to Conduct MOST Analysis
After discussing the significance of this amazing business tool and making you realize its importance in business, let's learn how to use it to analyze your internal business environment.
As we discussed earlier, the MOST analysis consists of four elements. First, it highlights the mission of a business. It sheds light on the goals a business wants to achieve.
Then it analyses the objectives of a business. In other words, it brings forward why a business wants to achieve the set goals.
Besides highlighting the goals of a business, it also tells how to achieve the set goals by formulating the right strategy and tactics to implement the planned strategies.
Mission
Your mission is essential in defining the reason for your business. Your mission will help guide you as you create the rest of your business plan. It should also be clearly articulated and set far beyond creating just a written document. You need to go into great detail in defining what you want to achieve.
For example, imagine you run a coffee shop. Stating a mission like you want your coffee shop to serve the best coffee in the world is a vague mission to set since it won't provide you with a direction.
Instead, you can set your mission to become the coffee shop that sells the best coffee in the city. This mission is more practical, and it could be the first step to becoming the best coffee-selling shop in the world later.
Objectives
Your objectives are a collection of your individual goals, and they help to guide you in the right direction to achieve the mission of your business. The objectives set by a business help it to analyze whether the achievements are in line with the objectives or not.
For example, your prime objective is to make money from your business. Imagine your business starts carrying out welfare projects. Although it is an achievement to do so. However, the achievement is not in line with the objective.
Strategy
Forming strategies clarifies what you need to do to accomplish your mission and objectives. Strategies are what you decide to do to reach your goals.
To clarify the role of strategizing, we'll combine the examples used earlier. For example, suppose your mission is to make your coffee shop the best-selling coffee in the city while making sums of money. In that case, you'll form a strategy that ensures the mission and objective are achieved.
In this case, you form a strategy to make the best coffee in the city and increase your customer base to increase revenue. In this case, you'll succeed in achieving both the mission and the objective.
Tactics
This is the final element of MOST analysis. Tactics help in breaking down the strategy into small steps. It provides small details about how the strategy will be implemented.
In the previous section, we gave an example of forming a strategy to make the best coffee and increase the customer base, but we didn't say how is that possible. Tactics will provide us with a complete roadmap for effectively implementing our planned strategy.
For example, tactics will analyze that you must hire the best coffee maker to make the best coffee in the city. Moreover, to increase the customer base, use practical tools such as marketing and innovation.
Where to Use the MOST Analysis
The MOST analysis is considered to be a very user-friendly business tool. It can be used in different phases of planning.
Planning of Career
Very effective use of the MOST analysis is while planning the career. At this stage, using MOST analysis can be beneficial as it will help in planning the career by first analyzing the mission and objective. Then by providing a suitable strategy and tactics to implement that strategy.
For example, the MOST analysis highlights that a clothing brand wants to become the world's top clothing brand and have high revenue. Further, it also provides strategies and tactics to achieve this goal. See? Didn't just the brand's entire career get planned with the help of MOST analysis?
Analysing Present and Future Strategy
MOST analysis can also be used while analyzing the current and future strategies that are to be made. Since the two elements of the MOST analysis analyze the strategy and tactics of a business, the business tool will also help in forming current and future strategies.
The strategy section in the MOST analysis will represent the business strategy in the long run. However, the tactics highlighted by the MOST analysis will shed light on the steps to be taken immediately to implement the future strategy.
Time to Time Evaluation
Businesses evolve with time but what keeps them committed to their mission and objectives is the evaluation of their business after a certain period. Businesses can use the MOST analysis to evaluate their business from time to time to see whether their operations are in line with the mission and objectives set or not.
Moreover, they can evaluate their performances while comparing them with the findings of the MOST analysis and see if any changes are required.
Case Study: MOST Analysis Practical Application
Until now, we have discussed what MOST Analysis is and how it can theoretically benefit businesses. You might be doubting the practical application of this business tool but wait, hold up for a second.
In this section, we will tell you a story about a giant food manufacturing company that used the MOST analysis to get "manager free." Isn't that amazing? Okay, let us tell you what happened in detail.
Morning Star, a food manufacturing giant that generates more than $700 million annually and has more than 400 employees, decided to eliminate the manager role and introduce a new "manager-free" system.
All the employees in the company now operate and evaluate their jobs on their own. No bosses or managers are present to dictate to the employees; they make their own decisions.
How did all of that happen? Of course, with the help of MOST analysis. The employees of Morning Star now follow missions provided by the MOST analysis instead of following managers' orders.
Since MOST analysis provides objectives, strategy, and tactics too, all these are implemented by the employees on their own. The employees coordinate with each other to review the practices and determine if they are succeeding or failing.
Not every business can adopt this model, but the purpose of discussing it is to highlight how important it is for a company to have a well-defined mission, objectives, strategies, and tactics, and all of the business elements mentioned are provided by MOST analysis. So now we hope you do understand the significance of MOST analysis.
Final Word: MOST Analysis
The MOST analysis is a business tool used to analyze the internal environment of a business. This business tool helps businesses by providing them with a roadmap and a structured pathway to follow.
The MOST analysis consists of four business elements. First, the letter M in the word "MOST" represents the business's mission. In other words, this highlights what the business aims to achieve.
The letter O represents the objectives of a business. Mission and objectives have to be aligned to achieve growth. One of the common problems among businesses is that, at times, they fail to understand the objectives to be achieved. However, MOST analysis caters to this problem by clearly identifying the objectives of a business.
The third letter, S in the word acronym MOST, stands for the strategy that must be implemented to achieve the set mission and objectives. The MOST analysis highlights how a business can achieve the goals set.
The last element of the MOST analysis, tactics, represents the steps necessary to implement the strategy to achieve business goals.
The MOST analysis is considered an essential business tool since it plays a vital role in forming a business plan with proper structure. Moreover, it helps businesses keep the working environment reasonable by avoiding conflicts and disagreements.
MOST analysis can be used during different business processes. For example, MOST analysis is a helpful tool for planning a business career. Moreover, it helps businesses to analyze current and future business strategies. It also plays a vital role in helping businesses evaluate their performance after a certain period.
The application of MOST analysis is not limited to theory. Many companies like Morning Star have proved that MOST analysis is helpful in practical life if implemented right.
Now that we have discussed every aspect of the MOST analysis, we hope you guys are now aware of how it helps businesses in identifying their mission, objectives, strategies, and tactics. We hope that besides getting know-how about the MOST analysis, you guys will now be able to conduct MOST analysis for your businesses and make the most out of it.
