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.
