Informal Gap Analysis

When beginning a process improvement journey or when moving to the next level in your current process improvement journey, it is important for an organization to determine what processes are currently in place.  Every organization has a quality system in place, or they wouldn't be in business.  Many organizations fail to really look at what they have prior to beginning their process improvement programs.  They pick a model and use it like a requirements document regardless of whether or not it works well for their organization as written.  We feel that it is important to determine what your organizational culture and business needs are as an organization before it either begins or continues a process improvement journey.  By determining the organization's current strengths and weaknesses, strengths can be built upon to help fill the process gaps while weaknesses are made less significant which results in attaining performance improvement through process improvement faster and less stressfully. 

Therefore, we recommend conducting an informal gap analysis when an organization is beginning its process improvement journey or midway between formal assessments to keep the organization on the right track. 

The informal gap analysis can be conducted with minimal cost to the organization and can provide valuable information regarding processes that are currently in place.  The goal, of course, is to identify processes that are perhaps there, but undocumented.  In short, an informal gap analysis is a highly effective yet inexpensive way to uncover "hidden" processes that may be used in some parts of the organization that could be documented and tweaked for use across the organization at minimal cost and risk in order to fill in existing gaps in the current process set.

Our expert consultants work with a select team from the client organization to perform the gap analysis and provide documented results that can be used to plan appropriate actions to get from the current state of the practice to the improved state based on the organizational goals and objectives.  This allows for the process improvement program to be planned and managed like any other project within the organization.  A gap analysis report provides senior management with status, progress, risks and issues on the process improvement program so they know that their process improvement money is being well spent.

Intro to CMMI-DEV Course
in Springfield, VA
14- 16 Feb 2012

Intro to CMMI-SVC Course
in Springfield, VA
27 - 29 Mar 2012

Intro to CMMI-DEV
in Springfield, VA
17 - 19 Apr 2012