This course is designed for leaders, supervisors, and professionals who must understand the theory and application of organizational analysis and who wish to benefit from identifying areas of weakness and then find approaches for eliminating problems that enhance strategic value.
Course Contents
Module 1 – Organizational Analysis (OA)
Key Topics
- What is an OA?
- The importance of an organizational analysis
- Steps in conducting an organizational analysis
- The SWOT analysis: an approach in organizational analysis
- Tips for writing an organizational analysis
Module 2 – Models of Organizational Analysis
Key Topics
- What is organizational analysis and how it helps businesses succeed in a dynamic business environment?
- Understand your business model and a key parameter in the process of organizational analysis
- Understand how business functions and the changes they experience so that they can reach their desired level of performance.
- Four models that organizations commonly work with – the rational model, the natural model, the socio-technical model, and the cognitive model.
Module 3 – Introduction to Organizations
Key Topics
- Using SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats) to determine competitive edge as an advantage that defines its success.
- Assessing organizational strengths involves evaluating management, workforce, and resources, as well as current HR communication goals.
- The role of internal analysis in understanding core competencies and resources.
- Defining the capability of an organization helps the management team to make sound decisions as they formulate long-term objectives. Other important aspects of an internal analysis include looking at financial objectives, strategic planning, and operational structure.
Module 4 – Analytic Features of Organizations
Key Topics
- Using organizational theories to systematically analyze how your organization operates and can best be managed.
- Demonstrate how organizational theories highlight features of an organization’s structure and environment, as well as its processes of negotiation, production, and change.
- Using these processes as a lens for interpreting novel organizational situations and developing a sense for how individual and group behaviors are organized.
- Theories are valuable for the analyst and manager because most organizational problems are unique to the circumstances and cannot be solved by simple rules of thumb.
Module 5 – Organizational Decision Making
Key Topics
- Various rational system views of organizations tend to focus on administrative units or leaders of organizations
- The difficulties of the analytical decision modeling process
- The validation process – case examples
- Critique of organizational change programs: gaps between modeling and implementation
- Overcoming organizational resistance to change

