Gap Analysis Template
Find, define, and close gaps to help your business reach its potential with the gap analysis template.
About the Gap Analysis Template
The gap analysis template helps you identify what’s missing from company products or processes, making it easy to collaborate on and analyze historical performance benchmarks. Sharing information reduces guesswork or conflicting opinions – especially when you focus on your organization’s internal elements and its challenges or opportunities for improvement.
This template can be adapted from the general gap analysis to focus on specific gap analyses for skills, candidates, software, processes, vendors, training, market, data, or security. After you complete a gap analysis, you may want to conduct a SWOT analysis to identify broader strengths and opportunities.
Using this strategic process helps your business compare its current, real-world situation with its ideal goals. Determining what obstacles might prevent teams or individuals from attaining goals sooner allows you to push your organization toward growth and development.
Pinpointing goals, understanding the current situation, and figuring out remaining obstacles allows your team to collaborate on a plan to achieve those goals.
How to use the gap analysis template
Creating and sharing your gap assessment template with your team is easy with Miro's visual workspace. This template can be adapted for any industry. Get started by following these steps:
1. Define your “current state”
Try to pinpoint your business’s problem areas that need improvement or realignment with the company vision. Go for the “big picture” view here – aim to understand all your business does and how its different components are performing.
2. Define your desired “future state”
Getting idealistic here will help you tap into the true potential of your team and the entire organization. Use alongside this template. Your team can then collaborate on creative ways to get closer to where you want to be, or to what success looks like in an ideal world.
3. Locate the gap between the two states and work toward solutions
By adding specific metrics like KPIs, you can focus on opportunities you can measure (such as percentage change, financial value, or increase/decrease in a number of items). These indicators should have baselines you can measure now, to compare to future performance. And, they should ideally be both short-term and long-term.
4. Implement an action plan or identify remedies for your team
Create specific tasks for your team to close the gaps you’ve identified. You can also prioritize tasks based on the difficulty or potential impact of each one.
When to use a gap analysis template
Performing a gap analysis can help your team become better strategic planners. Use it to identify problems, adapt products or services, or change company processes to better align on goals.
Specifically, your organization can use a gap analysis to:
Benchmark company results against external criteria such as industry standards
Analyze your products and services to find new sales and marketing opportunities
Forecast profits
Reveal opportunities for improvement in existing processes
Understand why Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) aren’t met
Discern the difference between a product or service’s current and potential market size
Discover more gap analysis example templates to plan effectively.
Are there different types of gap analysis templates?
Gap analysis templates are designed to help organizations identify specific areas for improvement. Performance gap analysis templates focus on pinpointing discrepancies between expected and actual performance levels, while market gap analysis templates help identify gaps in the market that the organization can fill. Similarly, skills gap analysis templates are used to identify gaps in employee skills and knowledge. By using these templates, organizations can gain valuable insights into areas of improvement and develop strategies to address them.
Can I customize a gap analysis template to suit my needs?
Gap analysis templates provide a structured approach to identifying gaps between current and desired states. These templates are designed to be customizable, allowing users to tailor them to their specific needs and requirements. This flexibility enables organizations to conduct a more comprehensive analysis that is aligned with their industry, goals, and objectives.
Can I collaborate with others using a gap analysis template?
You can collaborate by sharing the template with team members or stakeholders, allowing them to provide input and work together to analyze and address gaps.
How often should I conduct a gap analysis?
The frequency of conducting a gap analysis may vary depending on the context. Some organizations perform them annually, while others conduct them whenever significant changes occur in their industry or processes.
Get started with this template right now.
Infographic Template
Works best for:
Marketing, Desk Research, Documentation
As we bet you’ve experienced, data can get pretty dense and dry. But you need it to be compelling, memorable, and understandable. The solution? Infographics. These are tools that let you present information in a visually striking way and turn quantitative or qualitative data into stories that engage and resonate. Whoever you’ll be presenting to — customers, donors, or your own internal teams — our template will let you design an infographic that combines text and visuals to break down even the most complicated data.
Product Voice Design toolkit
Works best for:
Product Management, Planning
The Product Voice Design toolkit facilitates the development of consistent and impactful product messaging. By defining brand voice attributes, tone guidelines, and messaging principles, this toolkit ensures that product communication resonates with target audiences. With sections for crafting messaging frameworks, storytelling templates, and content guidelines, it empowers product teams to create compelling and cohesive product narratives. This toolkit serves as a valuable resource for enhancing product communication strategies and building strong brand identities.
Stakeholder Analysis Template
Works best for:
Project Management, Strategic Planning, Project Planning
Managing stakeholders is integral to completing a project on time and meeting expectations, so here’s how to use a stakeholder analysis to help. A stakeholder analysis empowers you to meet expectations and complete projects on time by identifying individuals, groups, and organizations with a vested interest in a program or process. In a typical stakeholder analysis, you’ll prioritize stakeholders based on their influence on a project and seek to understand how best to interface with them throughout the course of the project.
Product Backlog Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Kanban Boards, Product Management
Development teams are often juggling many products at once. A product backlog is a project management tool that helps teams keep track of projects in flight as they build and iterate, so you can store everyone's ideas, plan epics, and prioritize tasks. The highest-priority tasks are at the top of the product backlog, so your team knows what to work on first. Product backlogs make it easier for teams to plan and allocate resources, but it also provides a single source of truth for everyone to know what development teams are working on.
HEART Framework Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, Project Management, User Experience
Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success. Those are the pillars of user experience — which is why they serve as the key metrics in the HEART framework. Developed by the research team at Google, this framework gives larger companies an accurate way to measure user experience at scale, which you can then reference throughout the product development lifecycle. While the HEART framework uses five metrics, you might not need all five for every project — choose the ones that will be most useful for your company and project.
Production Timeline Template
Works best for:
Project Management
The Production Timeline Template is a visual roadmap, systematically outlining the sequence of activities, tasks, and milestones of a project over a defined timeframe. This graphical representation ensures clarity and direction for project teams, allowing everyone to see the project's entirety in one consolidated view. One of its standout benefits is fostering team alignment. By visually laying out tasks and deadlines, team members clearly understand their roles, responsibilities, and timelines, ensuring harmonious collaboration and reducing potential miscommunication or overlaps. This alignment streamlines the workflow and significantly enhances overall project efficiency.