Critical Success Factors

Identifying the things that really matter for success

So many important matters can compete for your attention in business that it's often difficult to see the "wood for the trees". What's more, it can be extremely difficult to get everyone in the team pulling in the same direction and focusing on the true essentials.

That's where Critical Success Factors (CSFs) can help. CSFs are the essential areas of activity that must be performed well if you are to achieve the mission, objectives or goals for your business or project.

By identifying your Critical Success Factors, you can create a common point of reference to help you direct and measure the success of your business or project.

As a common point of reference, CSFs help everyone in the team to know exactly what's most important. And this helps people perform their own work in the right context and so pull together towards the same overall aims.

The idea of CSFs was first presented by D. Ronald Daniel in the 1960s. It was then built on and popularized a decade later by John F. Rockart, of MIT's Sloan School of Management, and has since been used extensively to help businesses implement their strategies and projects.

Inevitably, the CSF concept has evolved, and you may have seen it implemented in different ways. This article provides a simple definition and approach based on Rockart's original ideas.

Rockart defined CSFs as:
"The limited number of areas in which results, if they are satisfactory, will ensure successful competitive performance for the organization. They are the few key areas where things must go right for the business to flourish. If results in these areas are not adequate, the organization's efforts for the period will be less than desired."

He also concluded that CSFs are "areas of activity that should receive constant and careful attention from management."

Critical Success Factors are strongly related to the mission and strategic goals of your business or project. Whereas the mission and goals focus on the aims and what is to be achieved, Critical Success Factors focus on the most important areas and get to the very heart of both what is to be achieved and how you will achieve it.

Using the Tool: An Example

CSFs are best understood by example. Consider a produce store "Farm Fresh Produce", whose mission is:

"To become the number one produce store in Main Street by selling the highest quality, freshest farm produce, from farm to customer in under 24 hours on 75% of our range and with 98% customer satisfaction."


The strategic objectives of Farm Fresh are to:

• Gain market share locally of 25%.
• Achieve fresh supplies of "farm to customer" in 24 hours for 75% of products.
• Sustain a customer satisfaction rate of 98%.
• Expand product range to attract more customers.
• Have sufficient store space to accommodate the range of products that customers want.

In order to identify possible CSFs, we must examine the mission and objectives and see which areas of the business need attention so that they can be achieved. We can start by brainstorming what the Critical Success Factors might be (these are the "Candidate" CSFs.)

Objective	Candidate Critical Success Factors
Gain market share locally of 25%	Increase competitiveness versus other local stores Attract new customers
Achieve fresh supplies from "farm to customer" in 24 hours for 75% of products	Sustain successful relationships with local suppliers
Sustain a customer satisfaction rate of 98%	Retain staff and keep up customer-focused training
Expand product range to attract more customers	Source new products locally
Extend store space to accommodate new products and customers	Secure financing for expansion Manage building work and any disruption to the business

Once you have a list of Candidate

CSFs, it's time to consider what is absolutely essential and so identify the truly Critical Success Factors.

And this is certainly the case for Farm Fresh Produce. One CSF that we identify from the candidate list is "Sustain successful relationships with local suppliers." This is absolutely essential to ensure freshness and to source new products.

Another CSF is to attract new customers. Without new customers, the store will be unable to expand to increase market share.

A third CSF is financing for expansion. The store's objectives cannot be met without the funds to invest in expanding the store space.

Tip: How Many CSFs? Whilst there is no hard and fast rule, it's useful to limit the number of CSFs to five or fewer absolute essentials. This helps you maintain the impact of your CSFs, and so give good direction and prioritization to other elements of your business or project strategy.

Using the Tool: Summary Steps

In reality, identifying your CSFs is a very iterative process. Your mission, strategic goals and CSFs are intrinsically linked and each will be refined as you develop them.

Here are the summary steps that, used iteratively, will help you identify the CSFs for your business or project:

Step One: Establish your business's or project's mission and strategic goals (click here for help doing this.)

Step Two: For each strategic goal, ask yourself "what area of business or project activity is essential to achieve this goal?" The answers to the question are your candidate CSFs.

Tip: How Many CSFs? To make sure you consider all types of possible CSFs, you can use Rockart's CSF types as a checklist. Industry - these factors result from specific industry characteristics. These are the things that the organization must do to remain competitive. Environmental - these factors result from macro-environmental influences on an organization. Things like the business climate, the economy, competitors, and technological advancements are included in this category. Strategic - these factors result from the specific competitive strategy chosen by the organization. The way in which the company chooses to position themselves, market themselves, whether they are high volume low cost or low volume high cost producers, etc. Temporal - these factors result from the organization's internal forces. Specific barriers, challenges, directions, and influences will determine these CSFs.

Step Three: Evaluate the list of candidate CSFs to find the absolute essential elements for achieving success - these are your Criticial Success Factors.

As you identify and evaluate candidate CSFs, you may uncover some new strategic objectives or more detailed objectives. So you may need to define your mission, objectives and CSFs iteratively.

Step Four: Identify how you will monitor and measure each of the CSFs.

Step Five: Communicate your CSFs along with the other important elements of your business or project's strategy.

Step Six: Keep monitoring and reevaluating your CSFs to ensure you keep moving towards your aims. Indeed, whilst CSFs are sometimes less tangible than measurable goals, it is useful to identify as specifically as possible how you can measure or monitor each one.

Key Points

Critical Success Factors are the areas of your business or project that are absolutely essential to it success. By identifying and communicating these CSFs, you can help ensure your business or project is well-focused and avoid wasting effort and resources on less important areas. By making CSFs explicit, and communicating them with everyone involved, you can help keep the business and project on track towards common aims and goals.

USP Analysis

USP Analysis

The Unique Selling Proposition:
Crafting Your "Competitive Edge"

For years, business trainers have stressed the importance of "USPs" (Unique Selling Propositions). Your USP is the unique thing that you can offer that your competitors can't. It's your "Competitive Edge". It’s the reason that customers buy from you and you alone.

USPs have helped many companies succeed. And they can help you too when you’re marketing yourself (when seeking a promotion, finding a new job or just making sure you get the recognition you deserve.) If you don't have a USP, you're condemned to a struggle for survival - that way lies hard work and little reward.

However, USPs are often extremely difficult to find. And as soon as one company establishes a successful USP in a market, competitors rush to copy it.

This tool helps you find your USP. And it then helps you think about how you’ll defend it.

How to use the tool:

Download our free worksheet to record your analysis, and then follow these four steps:

1. Understand the Characteristics that Customers Value:
First, brainstorm what customers value about your product or services and those of your competitors. Move beyond the basics common to all suppliers in the industry, and look at the criteria customers use to decide which product or service to buy.

As with all brainstorming, by involving knowledgeable people in the process, you'll improve the range of characteristics you’ll identify. So talk to sales people, customer service teams and, most importantly, talk to customers themselves.

2. Rank Yourself and Your Competitors By These Criteria:

Now identify your top competitors. Being as objective as you can, score yourself and each of your competitors out of 10 for each characteristic. Where possible, base your scores on objective data. Where you can’t, do your best to see things from a customer’s perspective and make your best guess.

3. Identify Where You Rank Well:
Now, plot these points on a graph. This helps you spot different competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

And from this, develop a simple, easily communicated statement of your USP.

Tip: When you identify your USP, make sure it’s something that really matters to potential customers. There’s no point in being the best in industry for something they don’t care about.

4. Preserve Your USP (and Use It!):
The final step is to make sure you can defend your USP. You can be sure that as soon as you start promote a USP, your competitors will do what they can to neutralize it: If you’ve got the best website, they'll bring in a better web designer. If you’ve got a great new feature in your product, you’ll see it in theirs next year.

If you’ve established a USP, it makes sense to invest to defend it – that way, competitors will struggle to keep up: By the time they’ve improved, you’ve already moved to the next stage.

And once you’ve established a USP, make sure the market knows about it!

Example:

Dan Jackson, the new CEO of LPC Office Supplies, was worried. He was confused by the situation he'd inherited, and felt that the company was drifting. Part of this, he felt, was that the company had no distinctive market position. He decided to use USP Analysis to find one.

After talking to the company's biggest customers, Dan has identified the following criteria as important:

- Price
- Quality of merchandise
- Range
- Catalog quality
- Website appearance and navigation
- Ease of ordering
- Speed of delivery
- Reliability of delivery.

He then ranks LPC and its competitors using the criteria he had identified. Some criteria he assesses objectively, and on others he relies on instinct, market reputation and salespeople's reports. This gives him the table below:

	LPC Supplies	Barnwick Smith	Roskan Group	HTX Supplies
Price	7	9	6	6
Quality	7	7	7	7
Range	9	6	5	9
Catalog Quality	9	7	6	9
Website	9	7	6	8
Ease of Ordering	7	7	7	6
Speed of Delivery	6	7	9	7
Reliability	7	7	9	7

Using these rankings, Dan plots this graph:

As he does, different industry USPs start to become plain. Barnwick Smith seems to operate a “pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap” policy. The Roskan Group seems to focus on fast, reliable delivery, possibly of urgent, essential materials.

Looking at these, Dan is sure that LPC can compete effectively against these competitors by emphasizing the breadth of its range and the quality of its catalog. However, HTX Supplies is more problematic: Curves are quite close. Even here, though, LPC seems to have better customer service and a better website. A USP of “The easy way to buy everything you need!” seems to work well.

Dan decides to invest in LPC's website and its customer service systems, with a view to opening up a clear gap between itself and HTX. And he then launches a marketing campaign stressing LPC's USP.

Key points:

USP Analysis is a useful way of understanding how people are competing in your industry. And it's essential for identifying your USP, so that you know what to build upon and emphasize to your prospects.

USP Analysis is a four stage process:

1. First, you list the decision criteria (explicit and hidden) that customers of your industry use in making purchase decisions;
2. Second, you rank yourself and your competitors by these criteria;
3. Third, you look at where you rank well, and craft a USP from this; and
4. Finally, you look at how you will defend and build your USP as competition evolves.

Core Competence Analysis

Get Ahead. Stay Ahead.

The idea of the “core competence” is one of the most important business ideas that has shaped our world. It is one of the key ideas that lies behind the current wave of outsourcing, as businesses concentrate their efforts on things they do well, and outsource as much as they can of everything else.

In this article we explain the idea and help you use it, on both corporate and personal levels. And by doing so, we show you how you can get ahead of your competition – and stay ahead.

By using the idea, you can make the very most of the opportunities open to you:

• You can focus your efforts so that you develop a unique level of expertise in areas that really matter to your customers. Because of this, you’ll command the rewards that come with this expertise; and
• You can learn to develop your own skills in a way that complements your company’s core competences. By building the skills and abilities that your company most values, you’ll win respect and be more likely to get the career advancement that you want.

Explaining Core Competences: The Value of Uniqueness

The starting point for understanding core competences is understanding that businesses must have something that customers uniquely value if they're to make good profits.

"Me too" businesses (with nothing unique to distinguish them from their competition) are doomed to compete on price: The only thing they can do to make themselves the customer's top choice is drop price. And as other "me too" businesses do the same, profit margins become thinner and thinner.

This is why there's such an emphasis on building and selling USPs (Unique Selling Points) in business: If you're able to offer something uniquely good, customers will want to choose your products and will be willing to pay more for them.

The question, though, is where this uniqueness comes from, and how it can be sustained.

In their key 1990 paper "The Core Competence of the Corporation", C.K.Prahalad and Gary Hamel argue that "Core Competences" are some of the most important sources of uniqueness: These are the things that a company can do uniquely well, and that no-one else can copy quickly enough to affect competition.

Prahalad and Hamel used examples of slow-growing and now-forgotten corporations that failed to recognize and capitalize on their strengths. They compared them with star performers of the 1980s (such as NEC, Canon and Honda), which had a very clear idea of what they were good at, and which grew very fast.

Because these companies were focused on their core competences, and continually worked to build and reinforce them, their products were more advanced than those of their competitors, and customers were prepared to pay more for them. And as they switched effort away from areas where they were weak, and further focused on areas of strength, their products built up more and more of a market lead.

Now you'll probably find this an attractive idea, and it's often easy to think about a whole range of things that a company does that it can do well. However, Hamel and Prahalad give three tests to see whether they are true core competences:

1. Relevance: Firstly, the competence must give your customer something that strongly influences him or her to choose your product or service. If it does not, then it has no effect on your competitive position and is not a core competence;

2. Difficulty of Imitation: Secondly, the core competence should be difficult to imitate. This allows you to provide products that are better than those of your competition. And because you're continually working to improve this competence, ir means that you can sustain your competitive position; and
3. Breadth of Application: Thirdly, it should be something that opens up a good number of potential markets. If it only opens up a few small, niche markets, then success in these markets will not be enough to sustain significant growth.

An example: You might consider strong industry knowledge and expertise to be a core competence in serving your industry. However, if your competitors have equivalent expertise, then this is not a core competence. All it does is make it more difficult for new competitors to enter the market. More than this, it's unlikely to help you much in moving into new markets, which will have established experts already. (Test 1: Yes. Test 2: No. Test 3: Probably not.)

Using This in Your Business and Career:

To identify your core competences, use the following steps:

1. Brainstorm the factors that are important to your clients.

If you're doing this on behalf of your company, identify the factors that influence people's purchase decisions when they're buying products or services like yours (make sure that you move beyond just product or service features and include all decision-making points.)

If you're doing this for yourself, brainstorm the factors (for example) that people use in assessing you for annual performance reviews or promotion, or for new roles you want.

Then dig into these factors, and identify the competences that lie behind them. As a corporate example, if customers value small products (e.g. cell phones), then the competence they value may be "component integration and miniaturization".

2. Brainstorm your existing competences and the things you do well.
3. For the list of your own competences, screen them against the tests of Relevance, Difficulty of Imitation and Breadth of Application, and see if any of the competences you've listed are core competences.
4. For the list of factors that are important to clients, screen them using these tests to see if you could develop these as core competences.
5. Review the two screened lists, and think about them:
• If you've identified core competences that you already have, then great! Work on them and make sure that you build them as far as sensibly possible;
• If you have no core competences, then look at ones that you could develop, and work to build those; or
• If you have no core competences and it doesn't look as if you can build any that customers would value, then either you need another way of being unique in your market (see our USP Analysis article), or you need to consider finding another environment that better suits your competences.
6. Think of the most time-consuming and costly things that you do either as an individual or a company.
   
   If any of these things do not contribute to a core competence, ask yourself if you can outsource them effectively, clearing down time so that you can focus on core competences.
   
   For example, as an individual, are you still doing your own cleaning, ironing and decorating? As a small business, are you doing you own HR and payroll? As a bigger business, are you manufacturing non-core product components, or performing non-core activities?

Tip 1: As with all brainstorming, you'll get better results if you involve other (carefully-chosen) people. Tip 2: On a personal basis and in the short term, it might be difficult to come up with truly unique core competences. However, keep this idea in mind and work to develop unique core competences. Tip 3: You may find it quite difficult to find any true core competences in your business. If you've got a successful business that's sustainably outperforming rivals, then maybe something else is fuelling your success (our article on USP Analysis may help you spot this). However, if you're working very hard, and you're still finding it difficult to make a profit, then you need to think carefully about crafting a unique competitive position. This may involve developing core competences that are relevant, real and sustainable. Tip 4: As ever, if your going to put more effort into some areas, you're going to have to put less effort into others. You only have a finite amount of time, and if you try to do too much, you'll do little really well.

Porter's Five Forces

Assessing the Balance of Power in a Business Situation

The Porter's 5 Forces tool is a simple but powerful tool for understanding where power lies in a business situation. This is useful, because it helps you understand both the strength of your current competitive position, and the strength of a position you're looking to move into.

With a clear understanding of where power lies, you can take fair advantage of a situation of strength, improve a situation of weakness, and avoid taking wrong steps. This makes it an important part of your planning toolkit.

Conventionally, the tool is used to identify whether new products, services or businesses have the potential to be profitable. However it can be very illuminating when used to understand the balance of power in other situations too.

How to Use the Tool:

Five Forces Analysis assumes that there are five important forces that determine competitive power in a situation. These are:

1. Supplier Power: Here you assess how easy it is for suppliers to drive up prices. This is driven by the number of suppliers of each key input, the uniqueness of their product or service, their strength and control over you, the cost of switching from one to another, and so on. The fewer the supplier choices you have, and the more you need suppliers' help, the more powerful your suppliers are.
2. Buyer Power: Here you ask yourself how easy it is for buyers to drive prices down. Again, this is driven by the number of buyers, the importance of each individual buyer to your business, the cost to them of switching from your products and services to those of someone else, and so on. If you deal with few, powerful buyers, they are often able to dictate terms to you.
3. Competitive Rivalry: What is important here is the number and capability of your competitors – if you have many competitors, and they offer equally attractive products and services, then you’ll most likely have little power in the situation. If suppliers and buyers don’t get a good deal from you, they’ll go elsewhere. On the other hand, if no-one else can do what you do, then you can often have tremendous strength.
4. Threat of Substitution: This is affected by the ability of your customers to find a different way of doing what you do – for example, if you supply a unique software product that automates an important process, people may substitute by doing the process manually or by outsourcing it. If substitution is easy and substitution is viable, then this weakens your power.
5. Threat of New Entry: Power is also affected by the ability of people to enter your market. If it costs little in time or money to enter your market and compete effectively, if there are few economies of scale in place, or if you have little protection for your key technologies, then new competitors can quickly enter your market and weaken your positi on. If you have strong and durable barriers to entry, then you can preserve a favorable position and take fair advantage of it.

These forces can be neatly brought together in a diagram like the one below:

To use the tool to understand your situation, look at each of these forces one-by-one.

Brainstorm the relevant factors for your market or situation, and then check against the factors listed for the force in the diagram above.

Then download our free worksheet, mark the key factors on the diagram, and summarize the size and scale of the force on the diagram. An easy way of doing this is to use, for example, a single “+” sign for a force moderately in your favor, or “--" for a force strongly against you (you can see this in the example below).

Then look at the situation you find using this analysis and think through how it affects you. Bear in mind that few situations are perfect; however use environmental scanning as a framework for thinking through what you could change to increase your power with respect to each force.

This tool was created by Harvard Business School professor, Michael Porter, to analyze the attractiveness and likely-profitability of an industry. Since publication, it has become one of the most important business strategy tools. The classic article which introduces it is "How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy" in Harvard Business Review 57, March - April 1979, pages 86-93.

Example:

Martin Johnson is deciding whether to switch career and become a farmer - he's always loved the countryside, and wants to switch to a career where he's his own boss. He creates the following Five Forces Analysis as he thinks the situation through:

This worries him:

• The threat of new entry is quite high: if anyone looks as if they’re making a sustained profit, new competitors can come into the industry easily, reducing profits;
• Competitive rivalry is extremely high: if someone raises prices, they’ll be quickly undercut. Intense competition puts strong downward pressure on prices;
• Buyer Power is strong, again implying strong downward pressure on prices; and
• There is some threat of substitution.

Unless he is able to find some way of changing this situation, this looks like a very tough industry to survive in. Maybe he'll need to specialize in a sector of the market that's protected from some of these forces, or find a related business that's in a stronger position.

Key points:

Porter's Five Forces Analysis is an important tool for assessing the potential for profitability in an industry. With a little adaptation, it is also useful as a way of assessing the balance of power in more general situations.

It works by looking at the strength of five important forces that affect competition:

• Supplier Power: The power of suppliers to drive up the prices of your inputs;
• Buyer Power: The power of your customers to drive down your prices;
• Competitive Rivalry: The strength of competition in the industry;
• The Threat of Substitution: The extent to which different products and services can be used in place of your own; and
• The Threat of New Entry: The ease with which new competitors can enter the market if they see that you are making good profits (and then drive your prices down).

By thinking through how each force affects you, and by identifying the strength and direction of each force, you can quickly assess the strength of the position and your ability to make a sustained profit in the industry.

You can then look at how you can affect each of the forces to move the balance of power more in your favor.

The Boston Matrix

(Also called the BCG Matrix, the Growth-Share
Matrix and Portfolio Analysis)
Focusing effort to give the greatest returns

If you enjoy visual representations and vivid descriptions of your business then you'll love the Boston Matrix!

Also called the BCG Matrix, it provides a useful way of looking at the opportunities open to you, so that you can pick the ones that will give you the best results.

In a world where we're bombarded with seeming opportunities (some good, some bad) this brings welcome clarity, helping you make the very most of your current position.

Understanding the Model

Market Share and Market Growth

To understand the Boston Matrix you need to understand how market share and market growth interrelate.

Market share is the percentage of the total market that is being serviced by your company, measured either in revenue terms or unit volume terms. The higher your market share, the higher proportion of the market you control.

The Boston Matrix assumes that if you enjoy a high market share you will normally be making money (this assumption is based on the idea that you will have been in the market long enough to have learned how to be profitable, and will be enjoying scale economies that give you an advantage).

The question it asks is, "Should you be investing your resources into that product line just because it is making you money?" The answer is, "not necessarily."

This is where market growth comes into play. Market growth is used as a measure of a market's attractiveness. Markets experiencing high growth are ones where the total market share available is expanding, and there's plenty of opportunity for everyone to make money.

By contrast, competition in low growth markets is often bitter, and while you might have high market share now, what will the situation look like in a few months or a few years? This mak

es low growth markets less attractive.

Note: The origin of the Boston Matrix lies with the Boston Consulting Group in the early 1970s. It was devised as a clear and simple method for helping corporations decide which parts of their business they should allocate cash to. Since the 1970s, it’s become much easier to borrow money cheaply (in many parts of the world) making this less of an issue. However the Boston Matrix is still a good tool for thinking about where to apply resources (of effort as well as money) and that’s how we use it here.

The Matrix Itself

The Boston Matrix categorizes opportunities into four groups, shown on axes of Market Growth and Market Share:

These groups are explained below:

Dogs: Low Market Share / Low Market Growth
In these areas, your market presence is weak, so it's going to take a lot of hard work to get noticed. Also, you won't enjoy the scale economies of the larger players, so it's going to be difficult to make a profit.

Cash Cows:
High Market Share / Low Market Growth
Here, you're well-established, so it's easy to get attention and exploit new opportunities. However it's only worth expending a certain amount of effort, because the market isn't growing and your opportunities are limited.

Stars:
High Market Share / High Market Growth
Here you're well-established, and growth is exciting! These are fantastic opportunities, and you should work hard to realize them.

Question Marks (Problem Child):
Low Market Share / High Market Growth
These are the opportunities no one knows what to do with. They aren't generating much revenue right now because you don't have a large market share. But, they are in high growth markets so the potential to make money is there.

Question Marks might become Stars and eventual Cash Cows, but they could just as easily absorb effort with little return. These opportunities need serious thought as to whether increased investment is warranted.

How to Use The Tool:

To use the Boston Matrix to look at your opportunities use the following steps:

Step One: Plot your opportunities in terms of their relative market presence, and market growth on the blank matrix provided on the worksheet as in figure above.

Step Two: Classify them into one of the four categories. If a product seems to fall right on one of the lines, take a real hard look at the situation and rely on past performance to help you decide which side you will place it.

Note: Be careful about these lines - there's nothing magical about them or their position. There may be very little real difference between a "Problem Child" with a market share of 49%, and a "Star" with a market share of 51%. It's also not necessarily true that the line should run through the 50% position. As ever, use your common sense.

Step Three: Determine what you will do with each product/product line. There are typically four different strategies to apply:

• Build Market Share: Make further investments (for example, to maintain Star status, or turn a Question Mark into a Star)
• Hold: Maintain the status quo (do nothing)
• Harvest: Reduce the investment (enjoy positive cash flow and maximize profits from a Star or Cash Cow)
• Divest: For example, get rid of the Dogs, and use the capital to invest in Stars and some Question Marks.

Tip 1: From a personal perspective, you can evaluate the opportunities open to you by substituting the dimension of "Market Share" with one of "Professional Skills". Plot the options open to you on the personal version of the BCG Matrix, and take action appropriately. Tip 2: A similar (and equally powerful) tool is the Action Priority Matrix, which helps you pick projects which legitimately give you the quickest and highest value returns. By using the BCG Matrix and Action Priority Matrix together, you get the best of both worlds!

Key Points

The Boston Matrix is an effective tool for quickly assessing the options open to you, both on a corporate and personal basis.

With its easily understood classification into "Dogs", "Cash Cows", "Question Marks" and "Stars", it helps you quickly and simply screen the opportunities open to you, and helps you think about how you can make the most of them.