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.
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