PESTEL Trend Analysis

1. Trends - Use PESTEL analysis (provided in the page tabs) to identify relevant trends to your organisation.

2. Opportunities - Consider the types of impact you can make with the trends. You can apply these trends to a Customer Journey Map, Service Blueprint, and Business Model Canvas.

   1. Mandatory work - You must take these forward, and they should be automatically prioritised. For example, a new data storage standard is coming in.

   2. Reduce costs - To increase profit or protect against competitors lowering prices.

   3. Reduce sales loss & churn - Some trends may present a future threat, leading to these.

   4. Increase market share - Opportunities to strengthen differentiation. Win customers new to the solution type. Target weak competitors.

   5. New markets/products.

3. Prefilter - Outside of mandatory work, the trends must result in solutions that:

   1. Solve a big enough problem.

   2. Meet basic desirability, feasibility and viability criteria (see this guidance).

   3. Align with your prioritised strategic direction. For example, if your priority is to reduce costs, then focus on these items. This does not mean you have to filter everything else out.

4. Strategy Items - Create Strategy Items ready for prioritisation (example below the grids).

Capture trends

The grid below can be used to capture trends and their details. For example, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a significant technology trend. Capturing AI as a trend is not helpful, as this is far too high-level to use. Consider a more appropriate level, AI data anomaly detection. With this trend, we can automate data clean up and avoid support calls. We may be able to apply this across many areas of a system, from an application process to an automated data migration.

Starting with benefits

When capturing trends, it is essential to highlight the business benefits. Let’s consider an older technology trend, cloud computing. This should improve scalability, accessibility (through being available everywhere securely), and be more cost-efficient (by only charging for what you use). Now you can check your idea against the expected benefits. For example, if you are trying to be more cost-efficient with storing data, does this really bring those benefits? In some cases, it may not. Without this consideration, we may create work based on trends that harm the organisation.

Technology drawbacks

Introducing new tools can have additional support requirements, make development more complex and slow down your time to market.

Upskilling

The person working on trend analysis may need to upskill a wider group. Using the previous example of AI data anomaly detection, this may be helpful across numerous areas of a software product. Upskilling more people improves the chances of identifying opportunities. This is particularly true when analysis activities are split. For example, a user researcher creates a customer journey map and, with their knowledge of this trend, can identify new opportunities.

An Excel spreadsheet containing the following grids can be downloaded here. You should augment the grids with more detailed training when the trend is complex to understand: