Happy’s Essential Skills: Project/Program Management

Estimated reading time: 13 minutes

What if you have just been assigned a difficult but important project. You already have some possible solutions in mind. However, before you choose a best solution, you need to identify what needs to be done to meet this project's objectives.

This is where Gap Analysis is useful. This simple tool helps you identify the gap between your current situation and the future state that you want to reach, along with the tasks that you need to complete to close this gap.

Gap Analysis is useful at the beginning of a project when developing a business case and it's essential when you're identifying the tasks that you need to complete to deliver your project.

Using Gap Analysis

To conduct a Gap Analysis for your project, follow these three steps:

1. Identify Your Future State

     First, identify the objectives that you need to achieve. This gives you your future state—the "place" where you want to be once you've completed your project.

2. Analyze Your Current Situation

     For each of your objectives, analyze your current situation. To do this, consider the following questions:

• Who has the knowledge that you need? Who will you need to speak with to get a good picture of your current situation?
• Is the information in people's heads, or is it documented somewhere?
• What's the best way to get this information? By using brainstorming workshops? Through one-to-one interviews? By reviewing documents? By observing project activities such as design workshops? Or in some other way?

3. Identify How You'll Bridge the Gap

Once you know your future state and your current situation, you can think about what you need to do to bridge the gap and reach your project's objectives.                      

Table 2: Example of element of a GAP Analysis to improve call-handling in your organization's contact center.

References

1. www.mindtools.com/pages/main/newMN_PPM.htm

Happy Holden has worked in printed circuit technology since 1970, with Hewlett-Packard, NanYa/Westwood, Merix, Foxconn and Gentex. He is the co-editor, with Clyde Coombs, of the Printed Circuit Handbook, 7th Ed. To contact Holden, click here.

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