What is a gap analysis?
A gap analysis allows organizations to thoroughly compare their actual business performance against potential or targeted performance levels in order to highlight shortcomings, deficiencies, or gaps that may inhibit their success.
Gap analysis examples
Here are some common types of gap analyses:
- Business technology and capability gap analysis: Evaluates limitations in current technical infrastructure, software, analytics, innovations, or overall abilities compared to industry benchmarks or standards needed for growth.
- Business process gap analysis: Assesses bottlenecks, pain points, and workflow or process weaknesses in current operations that actively hold back productivity, efficiency, and overall effectiveness.
- Employee training gap analysis: Identifies gaps in expertise, knowledge, or skills within existing staff and leadership. Determines development areas required to elevate talent and address deficiencies that undermine individual or organizational performance.
Benefits of using a gap analysis template
Essentially, a gap analysis helps assess where a company stands now against where it aims to reach in any capability or objective critical to its strategic goals. Using a template for your analysis helps standardize the process and offers the following benefits:
Clarifies business objectives
By structuring assessments around predefined strategic goals and performance indicators tied directly to desired outcomes, a gap analysis template keeps the most critical business objectives as the central focus. This prevents wasted effort evaluating irrelevant metrics or factors disconnected from top priorities.
Provides universal understanding
Standardizing gap examinations into a consistent outline brings shared clarity across leadership and staff teams. This process informs all stakeholders, so the entire organization understands exactly which deficiencies require addressing, enabling a unified commitment to resolutions.
Drives data-based strategizing
Over 91% of organizations achieved measurable value from data-driven investments in 2023. Quantifying exactly where and how the company falls short of benchmarks grounds solutions in research rather than assumptions. Fact-based gap awareness guides effective planning to address where improving weaknesses is most likely to drive desired growth.
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