ABSTRACT
Planning and management cannot take place in a vacuum. Understanding the environment in which the service operates and confronting the issues likely to affect its progress is a vital aspect of the strategic management process. The contemporary environment is vast and diverse, and also dynamic and complex. It must be monitored and charted carefully to identify the strategies that will enable our services to survive and thrive. We need to gather and collate information, and then analyse and assess the findings to identify the driving forces and other factors that will have an impact on our service now and in the future. Our appraisal needs to cover external forces, sectoral trends and internal issues. Some people prefer to begin with self-analysis of the business unit and work outwards, others start with global influences to provide the context for a situation audit of both the unit and its parent body. In practice, these strands are often pursued simultaneously, by distributing the work among individuals or groups.
