Increase your business performance with this gap analysis template

Gap Analysis Template: Find & Solve Business Problems

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Gap Analysis Template: Find & Solve Business Problems

A gap analysis template helps your team find gaps between your business' current and desired states

This template was built with Coda, the all-in-one doc that brings words, data, and teams together. Play with the template below or copy the doc to save your edits.

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Project/Item

Priority

Current State

Desired State

Gap Description

Retain in-house performance coach

High

Wendy is thinking about leave the company and our traders suffer if they don’t have her to provide them guidance.

Wendy should feel part of the team and committed to the company long-term. We shouldn’t hear rumors on the street that she wants to leave the company.

Wendy was left out of some big key decisions and may feel like she’s not making an impact. She is also caught in the middle during big decisions.

Reads on big trades

High

We are making bad reads on big trades resulting in millions of dollars of losses. Losing 60% of big deals.

Increase success rate on trades to 90%.

Need better information on companies and more due diligence. Head trader also has a big ego and feels the need to go against his team’s recommendations even though they provide sound analyses and judgments.

$100M donation to put name on building

Low

Name is not on the performing arts building. Current name is the Eads family and we have a grudge with them.

Eads name should be taken off the building and replaced with ours.

Eads family has naming rights in perpetuity. Had a grudge with a member of the family years ago and this is one way of settling the grudge.

There are no rows in this table

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A gap analysis is an assessment of your business's current performance and the future state of where you would like to see your business. The metrics you use in a gap analysis are usually quantitative measures, but qualitative and subjective measures can be used too. For most for-profit businesses, sales or revenue are the main metrics you might analyze.

A gap analysis starts with the current state of your business, team, or company. Then you come up with the desired state of your business, team, or company. The fun part of this analysis is the action plan you come up with to go from your current state to your future state. By asking good questions, you can figure out the path to get to your desired state. This gap analysis template is a good way for you to achieve your desired state and to close the gap .

What is a gap analysis template?

A gap analysis template helps you and your team visualize the gap analysis on your business. The template should help you do the analysis with your team collaboratively. More importantly, the gap analysis template gives you a record of the current and future states, the action plan, and more. Most gap analysis tools might only help with keeping a record of the analysis, but a Coda template helps with the analysis from beginning to end.

The brainstorming with your teammates, logging the current and future states, the action plan, etc. can all be stored in this template. There are many excel templates that let you do a gap analysis, but the best template should allow you to do these four things well:

Write your business's current state as a team

Write where you want to be in the future (future state) as a team

Enumerate the gaps between the current and future states

Find ways to close the gaps

Once the gap analysis is complete and your team is in agreement on the gaps, you can utilize a framework to start executing the action plan. This may involve doing a

SWOT analysis⁠

or setting

OKRs⁠

. Whatever the framework may be, the gap analysis should be done before you implement one of these frameworks. This way, you come up with strategic goals to achieve based on the current gaps in your business.

How to use this gap analysis template?

You can use this template for a variety of use cases. Perhaps you want to conduct a skills gap analysis, or increase customer satisfaction at your company. Whatever the case may be, the purpose of this template is to improve upon your business's current situation. Here's how to get started with this template after you've made a copy:

Step 1: List projects or items

On the

Gap Analysis⁠

page, the first thing you'll see is is a place to list out the different projects, initiatives, or items you want to focus on in the gap analysis template. You and your team can collaboratively add projects or items by first sharing the doc with your teammates and then hitting the Add Items button. In a for-profit business, the "projects" might be sales, training, or customer satisfaction.

Step 2: Identify current/future states and gaps

This is the key part of the gap analysis, and you and your team should spend the most time on this step. For each project or item you identified in step 1, ask three questions:

What is the current state of our business?

Where do we want our business to be in the future?

Why is there a gap between our current state and future state?

By asking these questions and peeling back the onion, you should be able to uncover the gaps in your business process that your team should improve. For the current and future states, you should be specific and add specific measures or KPIs. For example, the current state of your net profit might be 25% but your desired future state is 45%. For a more transparent overview, try Coda’s

SIPOC template⁠

to outline all business processes and share them with your team.

Step 3: Prioritize and add action items

Now that you've done the gap analysis, it's time to take action! For each project or item, your team should discuss the priority of that project and select the priority in the dropdown. In the layout, you can also click Add Action Item for each project so that there is a clear next step and owner of that action item. Each action item should be specific and have a business owner and due date. The gap analysis example includes dummy data which you can clear by hitting Clear Dummy Data at the top of the page.

Step 4: Take action

Most gap analysis templates you might use in Excel or PowerPoint stop here. What good is a template if it doesn't allow you and your team to drive real action to address the gaps you've identified?

In the

Action Plan Detail⁠

page, you'll see all the action items you added in step 3 organized by priority and project. This acts as the "to-do list" for you and your team. In order to tie this action plan with your company's broader strategic planning goals, you might tie this list into your company's OKRs (type /okrs in a Coda doc to see templates you can use) so that the gap analysis template is in-line with your current processes.

👉 Get started with: gap analysis template
Copy this template
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After you have made a copy, share the template with your teammates by clicking Share in the top-right of the Coda doc. This way the gap analysis template exercise is a collaborative exercise with you and your team.

What a gap analysis is

A gap analysis is a comparison of the current state of your business and future state or desired state of your business. There are many benefits of a gap analysis like for businesses of all shapes and sizes. A gap analysis can also be done for any industry from healthcare to non-profits. By identifying the gaps in your business, you can uncover the key steps, competencies, and skills your team need to do to take your business to the next level.

How to do a gap analysis?

Start by listing out projects or initiatives you want to improve upon. If you are doing a competitor or market gap analysis, you might just list out the different competitors in your market.

The next step is to list out the current and future states of each project, and then the reasons for the gaps that exist. If you are doing a gap analysis within the context of your company strategies and goals, it would make sense to include benchmarks in your analysis (e.g. current sales are at $10,000 per month).

The final step is to list out the action items you will take in a cohesive action plan to address the gaps in your business. There are many free gap analysis templates you can use and adapt to your specific scenario. This Coda template is one of them that gives you full customization similar to an Excel file.

Why a gap analysis is important?

A gap analysis is important because it encourages change within your team and company. By listing out facts about your business and the specific gaps that exist, you and your team can clearly see what needs to be done to achieve your future goals.

Second, a gap analysis is important because it is standardized framework you can apply to any company, use case, or industry. The most important parts of the gap analysis are the questions you ask you and your team to uncover the gaps in your business.

The more specific you make your gap descriptions the better. For instance, let's say you are trying to increase the net promoter score (a proxy for customer satisfaction with a product). Some questions you might ask to get to the root causes of the gap between your current and future states:

Why is our net promoter score so low? Our users are not happy with how slow the product is when they first sign up.

Why is the product slow? Because they are uploading too much data.

Why didn't we plan for that much data to be uploaded? We didn't expect this much data to be uploaded into our product.

Why haven't we built this feature? Because we have new product features to build that have a higher priority than this upload feature.

Why isn't this feature a priority? A majority of our users have asked us to build the current features that are at the top of our priority list.

Common FAQs about gap analysis templates

What is a gap analysis and how is it done?

A gap analysis is an exercise you do you with your teammates to identify the current state of your business, the future desired state you would like the business to be in, and the reason the gaps occur between the current and future states. The goal of the gap analysis is to improve upon your current situation, current processes, and benchmarks.

The gap analysis process you choose may depend on the specific industry you work in or the type of analysis you want to do. The analysis might relate to recruiting and hiring, sales, customer support, or technology in your organization. A successful gap analysis will contain key performance indicators and metrics so that you can clearly see how you are increasing your performance.

When should I do a gap analysis?

You should do a gap analysis when you want to grow your business or improve your business performance. Many teams may do a gap analysis when they are in the middle of a strategic planning cycle or OKR planning. During these planning cycles, you and your team can reflect on the different areas of the business or product you want to improve, and use the next sprint, quarter, or cycle to execute on that action plan.

What are the steps to conducting a gap analysis?

Before embarking on a gap analysis, you should understand your company's current benchmarks or KPIs. This way, you'll have data you need to create a thorough gap analysis report. Once you have these benchmarks, you can follow these steps for conducting a gap analysis:

Write the different projects, initiatives, or current processes you want to improve

Identify the current state of those projects (use specific metrics if possible)

Identify the future or desired state you want the business to be in (use metrics)

Discuss with your team on why gaps exist between the current and future states

Write out action items to address the gaps

At each step of the gap analysis process, it's important to ask good questions so that you and your team identify the root causes for the gaps. Why are there gaps in the first place? How did they occur if they didn't exist before? The more detailed you get with the questions (and your answers) the more clear your action plan will be to address your gaps.

Coming up with an action plan happens after a gap analysis, and many gap analysis templates don't give you a way of tracking how you and your team are closing the gap. In this template, there is a "to-do list" which includes all the action items you've brainstormed and identified with your team. This way, your gap analysis has measurable results for the rest of your company to observe.

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Gap Analysis⁠

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