The London Underground is famous for the saying "Mind the Gap" which encourages passengers to watch out for the space between the subway cars and the platforms at many of its stations. Most projects have gaps, only these are the differences between the requirements that have been explicitly stated, and the items needed to successfully deliver the intended result of the project. The technique of gap analysis helps the project team avoid falling into the gaps that could cause the project to fail, such as forgetting necessary data.

A project team I am working with right now is in the midst of a data conversion project in preparation for a new system implementation. Because we are consolidating several sources of data and replacing some existing systems and replacing them with new, we have several opportunities to leave stuff out. In order to mitigate the risk of forgetting something, we are in the process of doing several comparisons – the documents we use to gather information for the systems versus our data model, an interface with a core system and our data model, existing reports and our data model, and several extracts in our data model. In all of these cases, we are trying to make sure that we have everything covered – meaning we have a place to store all of the data we are collecting, and we have the data needed for every report and extract.

Think of a gap analysis exercise as balancing your checkbook. If you are conscientious about balancing your checkbook, you go through the bank statement and use it as the source of record when comparing to your checkbook, then you reverse course and go through your checkbook as the source of record and look for anything that may be missing on your statement. As long as you trust your bank, you tend to trust the bank statement more, but it always helps to verify that there is nothing out of the ordinary in your check book.

Even though gap analysis is a rarely straightforward exercise, it's surprising how many project teams do not know how to do them, or just choose not to. This latest experience has shown that by getting the team to think about comparisons between existing and anticipated features and functionality, and describing the process as similar to balancing checkbooks that gap analysis are easier for the team to understand and successfully complete. It certainly helped on the project I described above. Posting the Mind the Gap reminder in the team room didn't hurt either.

Comments

As someone who transitioned from accountancy/audit into business analysis, I am very aware of the risks gaps can pose in projects, and the need to do rigorous gap analysis.
As someone who is keen to continually refine my own gap analysis techniques, I would be interested in more details of the techniques you used if that is possible.

Thanks for your comment Alan. As it turns out the, gap analysis techniques we are using are pretty straight forward.

First, work with the team to determine what all possible comparisons should be done to identify possible gaps.

Second, we had a BA go through the information that had already been compiled and do a first pass at the comparison.

Third, the BA gathered all of the knowledgeable team members get together and walk through the items they identified, asked any questions that the BA had come up with, and then discussed with the team any remaining gaps.

The real advantage is we have a very committed team with both business and technical knowledge that has a common place to work on the project.