What is Gap Analysis & Prioritization?
How closely does your organization’s strategy align with its mission and resources? The GAP Analysis and Prioritization (GAP) process ensures that what you should do, what you say you do, and what you actually do are fully aligned—eliminating inefficiencies and maximizing impact. By enabling data-driven decisions, GAP helps you buy down risk, bridge capability gaps, and eliminate redundancies, ensuring that every initiative, investment, and action is directly linked to strategic priorities and customer demands.
Through structured evaluations—such as the 10,000+ strategic judgments analyzed for a DoD combat support agency—GAP identifies underserviced risks, reallocates overcommitted efforts, and pinpoints areas to divest. Proven in national security, defense, and resilience planning, GAP is highly adaptable to any mission-driven organization seeking greater strategic clarity and efficiency. By applying GAP, you can make smarter decisions, eliminate wasted effort, and ensure every resource is driving measurable impact.
How We’ve Used GAP to Solve Challenges
Risk Balanced Resource Allocation: A DHS program office needed a decision aid to determine where to invest, sustain, streamline, or divest its efforts in a specific homeland security space.
Starting with RPM to characterize and quantify risk across 50 key functions, we used GAP to assess the relevance, impact and priority of 90 efforts. The scored outcome was provided in several actionable metrics, including relative scores for ‘Attention Given’ versus ‘Attention Warranted’ for each of their 90 efforts.
Armed with this knowledge, the program office reframed its programming plan to rebalance it towards underserviced risk, streamline overlaps, right-size investments, and eliminate unwarranted effort. More than 30 efforts were combined or altogether eliminated.
Learn more about our Strategic Design Approaches (SDA) for Risk Management here or contact us today to talk about your specific challenges!
