Annual gap analysis process

Annual gap analysis process

The Open Forest Product Manager facilitates an annual gap analysis to ensure that the product team has the right skills, resources, tools, and infrastructure to handle issues that come up in the course of the team's ongoing research, design, and development work. You can find the gap analysis template here.

Here's a high-level outline of the process:

• Independently or as a team, brainstorm common scenarios that the team encounters and needs to be able to handle in order for the project and product to be successful.

• As a team:

  • Refine and achieve consensus on the scenarios, making sure that there is a scenario to cover every "showstopper."
  • Write down success criteria for each of the scenarios and consider What does the team need to be able to do in order to handle the scenario?; What skills does the team need to have?

• Use the scoring sheet in the gap analysis template to assess the criticality and team readiness for each scenario.

• Prioritize scenarios with the lowest scores.

• For each priority scenario, write down the tasks that the team needs to complete in order to ensure that they can meet the success criteria.

• Develop a plan for completing these tasks.