Before you go into detailed planning of your project or how to reach your business goals, it would be a good idea to take some time to consider for instance what the strengths and weaknesses of your business are. 

A simple tool for getting an overview of the situation of your business is to make a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for:

• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Opportunities
• Threats 

If you would like to take a look at the "big picture" characteristics of a business environment (e.g. a country, a region, or a new or existing market), you can do a PEST analysis. 

This will help you understand the Political, Economic, Social, and Technological trends and changes that you should take into consideration and that you could take advantage of.

Other organisations, companies, groups of people etc. can influence the success of your business. 

A stakeholder analysis helps you understand the attitudes and needs of different stakeholders so that you can plan how to communicate and build relations with them.

Maybe you also have internal stakeholders to consider, e.g. employees.

With a stakeholder canvas you can map your stakeholders according to how you see their level of interest in your project and their level of influence on it.

If you want to go deeper into the uncertainties, threats or risks of your business goals or projects, you can make an assessment of the risks.

This can make you aware of how you can handle the risks based on their probability of happening and the possible consequences of that.

This chart illustrates that high probability combined with big consequence naturally will pose a critical risk. 

Try to consider the risks related to your goals or projects and place them in the chart.