Gap Analysis Template

78% of goals in the average strategic plan have no single owner — and unowned goals complete about a third as often as goals with one clear owner. Our free Gap Analysis Template gives you a 5-line working sheet, a single-owner field, and an automatic health formula, plus a fully filled-in EMS example and a breakdown of the four gap types. Built from patterns across 20,582 real strategic plans.

Here's the pattern behind almost every strategic plan we've reviewed: the goals that stall aren't the ambitious ones — they're the ones nobody actually owns. Across 20,582 plans we've analyzed, 78% of goals have no single person responsible for them. And when a goal does have one clear owner, it gets completed about three times more often than when it doesn't. That's not a motivation problem. It's a design problem, and it's fixable.

The free Gap Analysis Template is built to fix it. Start Here walks you through the method in plain language, citing the same numbers above. The Gap Analysis working sheet gives you ten rows to map your own goals in five lines each — objective, current state, gap, action, and a single named owner — with a health status that calculates itself from what you enter. A Filled-In EMS Example shows the sheet completed for a real-world program, so you're never staring at a blank template. And the Gap Types tab walks through the four categories of gaps we see most often, so you know which one you're looking at before you start writing actions.

No fluff, no 40-page workbook to wade through. Just the fields that matter, the owner column that's usually missing, and a health formula that tells you where you actually stand.