18. Mioveni, Romania : SWOT analysis
Mioveni is a smaller community of less than 30,000 inhabitants located in the North of Pitesti in south-central Romania. The city is famous for its Dacia auto-plant that was recently fully acquired by Renault.
The Problem
Mioveni, like many cities throughout Romania, strove to achieve a higher level of prosperity and growth that would ensure raising living standards for its citizens. The city prepared its community profile, conducted a business attitude survey — both as part of a USAID-sponsored LED component of the GRASP project — and began to strategize about the future and how best to influence it.
Disorganized data. The objective data and subjective opinions gathered in the analytical part of the planning process were useful, but they were not organized well enough to enable the busy community leaders to easily orient themselves in the findings. At the same time, most of the analysis focused on the city and its internal development parameters, while external trends were only addressed generally in the documents.
Need for simplification and context. The analysis clearly needed a fresh and simplified look that would categorize its key components into positive and negative perspectives. At the same time, the community leaders determined that to achieve prosperity, they needed to address three most critical issues: attraction of foreign direct investment, human resource development, and strengthening the local SME sector. This context was not applied in the previous analytical documents.
Insufficient understanding of the findings. Last but not least, even though the community leaders and city representatives prepared the analytical reports, and the consultants held presentations, the members of the strategic development commission in Mioveni were not really certain they understood all the data and were not aware of their relevance for given issues.
The Solution
To address the above problem,.Mioveni decided to use the SWOT analysis system, which distinguishes between external and internal analysis: Internal analysis (strengths and weaknesses) focuses only on the critical issues, whereas external assessment is conducted in the form of a PEST (political, economic, social, and technological trends) analysis. These analyses were conducted by two specially created task forces that worked under supervision and facilitation of experienced consultants.
- The brainstorming that resulted in the final SWOT report had many important outcomes: Community leaders have been forced to think about their city using the optics of critical issues, distinguishing and categorizing positive and negative facts.
- The report structured the critical issues into subcategories revealing their strengths and weaknesses.
- Understanding of the analytical findings by the community leaders was deepened — making them ready to produce an action plan.
- External factors that cannot be influenced by Mioveni were discussed, and the community leaders became well aware of them — this helped them during the planning process to focus on the opportunities and try to minimize the possible negative impact of the threats.
Conclusions
SWOT analyses are useful tools in making communities ready to act in economic development in a smart way. They also help strategic planners learn to better understand the facts from their analysis and be better prepared to create better focused action plans.
Mioveni’s complete SWOT analysis is presented in Annex 2.
