Thr
oughout my engineering career I’ve often been involved in gap analysis. I hated this exercise because in many cases it was painful and required a lot of non-productive work, like searching for key requirements within a document to highlight those for analysis and keeping record of gaps, findings, comments etc. After the actual gap analysis work there were further struggles when gaps were identified and you needed to create action plans, deviation registers etc. In the end your boss would always request for a clear and transparent report of your work and you’d spend another day or two compiling all your records into something solid. Simply speaking this was not the job of my dreams.
I was trying to find a standard procedure or a workflow for this exhausting yet business valuable
process, but I found that it was performed in different ways by everyone (even in a same organisation). I could not find any gap analysis software on the web either.
Then a crazy idea came into my mind – creating a computerized framework, which will be uniform for any gap analysis in any industry where there are written requirements or regulations to be followed.
It took a while before this idea has crystallized in my head so I was able to talk distinctly about it with software developers. That was then followed by a long period of sleepless nights and broken weekends for our team as we were building this crazy system (sometimes even driving each other mad).
As a result, this beauty was born and we named it GA Lab, which stands for Gap Analysis Laboratory. It has arms and legs and can talk. Well, at least it is essentially equipped to help professionals in this painful process and get it done in a breeze. The main gene in its computerized DNA is to reduce time and effort spent on gap analysis, gap assessment, risk assessment, actions management, reporting and analytics and so on.
Now when we were done with developments, we found that there is yet another big battle ahead – Getting The Baby To Those Who Need It The Most – e.g. to engineers, auditors, QA specialists, business developers and all other people who are still suffering from tedious manual gap analysis work, while it appears to be the 21st century when the most of manual work is being performed by computers.
Well, long story short, we hope that this website will attract the attention of those who need it. We will be very grateful for any comments or suggestions on how to improve GA Lab and also for spreading the word about it.
Your sincerely,
Asaitec.