A business is often founded upon a specific vision and a business plan as its basis, but it’s easy to lose sight of the plan or vision as soon as the company is up and running. There are countless activities on a daily basis that can cause the company to slowly deviate from what the management had initially envisioned. Staying on track with the original vision requires a close connection between your long-term goals and your activities in the short-term, this is where a
MOST Analysis can be valuable.
A MOST Analysis (also known as a VMOST) can be split into two sections. The first being the Mission and Objectives of the Company, and the second being the Strategy and Tactics that will be used to achieve them.
MOST stands for:
- Mission
- Objectives
- Strategy
- Tactics
Why should you use MOST?
This simple framework helps define each level of the business’s projection.
By defining a mission, your company can then create objectives to work towards your Mission; Strategies that work towards your objectives; and, of course, tactics that fulfil your strategy.
The MOST Analysis is a wholesome overview of the critical workings in your business and aids in identifying wastage, streamlining processes, and achieving goals. Using a MOST Analysis is an essential piece in your planning stage and forms the basis for your organisational strategy.
So how should a MOST Analysis be performed?
Mission
Your Mission is the overall reason you’re in business. This is the crowning glory of what you want to achieve with your business. This often does not have a monetary focus, so think broader in what you want your business to solve.
Objectives
Unlike your Mission statement, you can have multiple goals you want to achieve that will all play into your much wider Mission. Objectives in themselves are also broad and state what you want to be done in order to complete your Mission.
Strategy
Creating a strategy to overcome your competition and win in your sector means you have a strong understanding of where your business sits at all times. Your strategy may change over time, depending on how fast-moving your niche is.
Tactics
Tactics are low-level and very specific actions that will be taken to fulfil your strategy. There’s no limit on the number of tactics that could be used, and tactics will vary drastically depending on the knowledge, tools, and experience your business has.
1. Mission
A company’s Mission is a concise statement of what your company wants to do and what your company can do and what purpose it exists for. A basic consequence of the Mission for each organisation is to offer a service or to sell products to customers.
Employees need to be committed to this Mission, but the Mission is also important to others, such as the managers, customers, or other stakeholders such as shareholders or patrons. A good mission is not created through averages but specifics and should be able to be understood by all employees and other interested parties. Ideally, everyone should be able to identify with this statement.
It is the main reason to do business from the highest level of the organisation and expresses what you want to achieve. The more specific the Mission, the more successfully the rest of the aspects in the MOST Analysis can be filled in.
Mission Examples
Suppose you have a coffee-roasting business in the city centre. In this case, you can assume that the Mission is to be the best possible coffee roaster and to impress each customer with stories about the coffee’s origins. This sounds good, but in terms of a mission, it doesn’t say much. After all, this goal doesn’t really give you a direction in which to continue. Instead of that, becoming the best coffee roaster in this city and its surroundings is much more tangible and specific. When the majority of companies and consumers come to your company for your roasted coffee, you know that the objective has been achieved. You then take the rest of the MOST analysis framework in order to make this possible.
Suppose you have a coffee-roasting business in the city. Here you can assume that the Mission is to be the best possible coffee roaster and to impress each customer with stories about the coffee’s origins. This may sound good, but as a mission it isn’t specific enough to be realistic. After all, this goal doesn’t really give you a direction in which to continue. Instead of that, becoming the best coffee roaster in this city and its surroundings is much more tangible and specific. When the majority of companies and consumers come to your company for your roasted coffee, you know that the objective has been achieved. You then take the rest of the MOST analysis framework in order to make this possible.
2. Objectives
An Objective is a goal used to aim towards a better state of being for an organisation, individual, team, or unit. Systematically formulated goals within organisations are balanced and based on data from the balanced scorecard. A successful objective follows the principles of SMART (being specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely). To check that you’re on track, make sure your objectives are monitored and measured, you can verify them by using statistics and indicators.
Objective Examples
Carrying on from the previous example, if you were the owner of a coffee roasting company, you should emphasise objectives that indicate how you can become the best coffee roaster of the city and its surroundings. An objective could be to receive a certain portion of the orders online, to increase revenue by X% a month, or to attract X number of customers before the end of the year.
Remember that Objectives should be measurable so that the various techniques and methods used to achieve these goals can be verified.
3. Strategies
The strategy is a long-term plan designed to achieve a specific goal. In practice, they’re planning to achieve requests from interested parties (shareholders, etc.) about the organisation’s management. The strategy is usually penned in a formalised document that contains a description of the phases of the strategic cycle, containing a story of an organisation’s Mission, vision, and strategic objectives, with diagrams or charts for implementation.
Note that there can be only one main strategy, as confusing this with other ideas is dangerous for an aspiring organisation’s growth, use this chance to determine the organisation’s direction.
Strategy Examples
With the coffee shop example, the shop would need to attract customers away from the competition. For example, he could offer a promotion, making each item’s price lower than the competition’s. New investments in marketing, such as online advertisements or radio commercials, could also be a strategy for growing your company’s reach.
As for which strategy will work best depends solely on the market and the audience you’re targeting. Make a list of strategies that can be used to achieve your goals. Adjust the strategy it isn’t working well – Strategies should be specific, helpful, and most of all, achievable.
4. Tactics
Tactics are methods used within the organisation to achieve objectives, strategically completing tasks to realise the overall (SMART) business goals. They are usually simple processes that concern ideas that team members or employees should be able to carry out, even if they weren’t directly involved in doing the MOST Analysis. This is why it’s important that your tactics, just like your goals, should be both SMART and effective.
Tactics Examples
With the coffee roaster, a marketing tactic could mean, writing the script for these commercials, hiring a marketing specialist, and etc. The goal of any company’s tactics is to direct the daily activities for your employees in order to ensure that your organisation is led down the proper path towards the general Mission.
