Identifying inefficiencies in a business process. | Determining why customers give a product low rankings. |
Identifying sales deals that were not profitable. | Determining why a firm has higher IT overhead costs than the competition. |
Identifying practices that have caused safety incidents on a worksite. | Determining why high performing employees have a high turnover rate. |
Investigating why a product has a high rate of customer returns. | Determining the source of defects on a production line. |
Identifying how employees really feel about a firm and how this differs from the firm’s target culture. | Investigating patch management processes and how some critical security patches have been missed. |
Identifying gaps in customer communication. | Exploring the end-to-end customer journey to identify problems with the customer experience. |
Determining why some students in a school system have low academic performance. | Comparing production costs with a competitor to identify cost disadvantages. |
Comparing brand perceptions with a competitor to identify branding issues. | Investing project management practices to determine why projects have failed. |
Investigating the perception that performance reviews are inconsistent across a firm. | Identifying practices that are inconsistent with a firm’s environmental values. |
Strategy
An ecommerce company looks at the gaps between its strategy and the structure of the firm. It discovers that the firm has a stated goal to improve customer satisfaction but has failed to scale support technology and staffing with revenue, resulting in declining customer service levels.Practices
An airline performs a gap analysis considering customer service practices and culture. They interview both employees and customers with particular attention to dissatisfied customers. They determine that front line employees need more authority to grant certain exceptions. The also recommend that managers be freed from dealing with exceptions to focus on serving customers to lead by example.Process
A telecom company performs a gap analysis to understand why a number of orders have been delivered late to customers. They map out the current process and identify manual steps, redundant work, overly complex dependencies, bottlenecks, technology pain points and process risks and document them as gaps. The gap analysis also produces an optimized target state process that cuts days from order provisioning time, reduces cost and mitigates risks.Capabilities
A retail bank requires hundreds of capabilities across dozens of products and channels. A gap analysis delivers a heat map that shows the status of each capability for each product and channel combination. For example, it shows the status of a capability such as fraud detection for a product such as credit cards for a channel such as telephone banking.| Overview: Gap Analysis | ||
Type | Business Analysis | |
Definition (1) | The process of identifying suboptimal or missing strategies, structures, capabilities, processes, practices, technologies or skills and recommending steps to optimize for an organization's goals. | |
Definition (2) | The process of identifying problems and issues. | |
Related Concepts | ||
