Gap Analysis Template
Find, define, and close gaps to help your business reach its potential.
About the Gap Analysis Template
Your team can use a gap analysis to help identify what’s missing from company products or processes. Collaborate on and analyze historical performance benchmarks together. 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 commit to a SWOT analysis to identify broader strengths and opportunities.
Keep reading to learn more about the Gap Analysis Template.
What is a gap analysis?
A gap analysis is a strategic process that helps your business compare its current, real-world situation with its ideal goals. When you determine what obstacles might be preventing teams or individuals from attaining goals sooner, it helps you 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.
When to use a gap analysis
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
Create your own Gap Analysis Template
Performing your own gap analysis and sharing it with your team is easy, using Miro’s virtual collaboration platform. This template can be adapted for any industry. Get started by selecting the Gap Analysis Template, then take the following steps to make one of your own.
1. Define what your “current state” is.
Try to pinpoint your business’s problem areas that need to be improved or realigned with the company vision. Go for the “big picture” view here – aim to understand all that 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.
Get started with this template right now.
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