Imagine that you are a project manager in a company and you are handling different activities of a project. For accomplish every project activity you may have many possible solutions in mind. However, for selecting a best solution, you must need to identify what should be done to complete a particular activity or to meet your company project’s objectives and goals.
Gap analysis tools (Spreadsheets, Fishbone Analysis, McKinsey 7s, SWOT & Surveys) serve and help management to identify the gap between a company current situation and the future state that company want to reach, and also identify the required tasks that you need to complete to close this gap.
Gap Analysis Definition & Meaning
Gap Analysis can be simply defined as “The process through which a project manager or senior management of a company compares its actual performance to its expected performance to determine whether company is meeting expectations and using its resources (human & financial) effectively. It basically answers the questions “where is a company? It shows the company Current state and “where do company want to be? It shows the company target or future state. It is not only useful at the beginning of a company project when developing a Business Case but it is also helpful for a project manager or company to identify the tasks company or project team need to complete to deliver the project.
3 Steps to Do a Gap Analysis?
Project manager need to follow these three steps to conduct Gap Analysis for a company project:
1. Identify Your Future State
First, of all as project manager you need to identify the objectives and goals of project which company wants to achieve from the particular project. By doing this you will know your future state – the “place” where you or company wants to be after the completion of project. Use the sample gap analysis template excel and gap analysis template in word.
2. Analyze company Current Situation
For each of project objectives or goals, management or project manager need to analyze company current situation. To do this, project manager should consider the following questions:
- What is information you need and from whom you will collect this information? To whom you need to speak to get a clear picture of company current situation?
- You have to analyze is the information in people’s heads is accurate or, which one is documented somewhere?
- What’s the best way to get required information? Either by using brainstorming, through conducting face to face interviews or by any else technique? For example by reviewing company documents.
3. Identify how you will Bridge the Gap
As a project manager once you identified company future state and company current situation, now it’s the step to think about how you can bridge the gap and accomplish project’s objectives. So in this last step you need to do to bridge the gap between company current situation and the desired future state.
After conducting gap analysis as a project manager should provide an appropriate amount of detail to project member or project management team. If you present excessive detail, project team will be overwhelmed, and if you don’t give enough or required detail, you won’t tell them what they need to know to successfully accomplish the project.
