Question

Career Development Analysis

Write a paper outlining gap analysis (instructions below) in your organization and two action steps that you have taken with their results.

Part 1. Gap Analysis (also called a Needs Analysis):
Be sure to identify the following steps in your process within the paper:
A. State your goal as clearly as possible. It should be a SMART goal.
B. Where are you now, in terms of your goal?
C. What is the gap between where you are now and where you want to be?
D. How can you bridge the gap? Outline options and suggestions. There should be multiple alternatives.
E. What will it cost to bridge the gap? In other words, what resources will you need for each of the options? Specify in terms of time, money, relationships, and other things, such as needing to relocate, moving children out of one school into another, significant other having to change job, …
F. Will achieving the goal be worth the cost? Why?
G. How will you know when you have reached your goal? (Evaluation step)

Part 2. Action Steps
You will list two action steps to be taken on basis of above analysis and describe what happened when you took them.
One of the steps must involve a community or business organization. That step may be contacting the human resource manager to examine your goals and objectives. It may be volunteering or shadowing in an organization where you wish to work.

Answer 1

A.) There was a new product launched by the company last month. The goal of the company was to have a 1st quarter sale of $90,000 for that specific product.

B.) After one month of the launch, company evaluated it's sales, and found that the total sales of the product in 1st month was $20,000. The monthly goal was on an average $30,000. Therefore, unexpectedly the sales were less by $10,000 for the first month, which made the company do a gap analysis, so that the quarterly target can be achieved by covering the 1st month's deficit of $10,000,  in next two months.

C.) The gap between where we should have been, and where we are standing now is $10,000 for this month and $30,000 for the quarter if we continue at the same speed, which has to be covered now in next two months, making the target for next two months to be $35,000 each, wherein, it should have been only $30,000.

D.) In order to bridge the gap, we will have to change the strategy a bit. For increasing the sales there are two possible options:

1.) The product is currently been sold in only 2 states in the country through retail stores, selling it in 3rd state could increse the sales, but includes an additional one time cost of $5,000, and a monthly cost of $5,000 to be beared by company. But, will give a additional monthly sale of $15,000 from the 3rd state every month.

2.) Spending $5000 monthly on digital marketing, to promote the sales, which can potentially increase the sales by average $15,000 per month, taking the average expected sales for every month to be $40,000.

E.) In the first approach, the contract paper work with new retailer in the third state would have to be done. Along with it the logistics and supply chain would also have to be managed for that state. The cost involved in setting up everything is $5,000 initially, along with monthly expenditure of $5,000, to manage logistics. No new employees would be needed. The process can be completed in a single day.

Whereas, in the second approach a 2 employee team will be dedicated for the product's digital marketing. The cost for these two employees is monthly $5000, however through their efforts they would increase the sales by almost $15000 per month, taking the average sales of every month to $40,000 on an average and at the same time creating a positive product image as well amongst the customers. The process can be initiated in just a single day.

F.) In both the cases, achieving the goal would be worth the cost as the quarterly sales would bypass the expected sale of $90,000 by a big margin, however i beleive the second option of digital marketing is better in long term, as it would help the company to spread awareness about the product, increasing the demand at a more rapid speed in future. But, both the alternatives would help achieve the quarterly target without a doubt.

G.) The results would be visible in just a month of initiating both the alternatives. So, if the second month's total sales is at least $40,000, than we would know we have achieved our goal through the change in strategy or not.

PART TWO:

From the two alternatives, both the alternatives were implemented simultaneously increasing the monthly sales by $15,000 each in both the scenarios. However, in the first scenario an additional one time cost of $5,000 was required.

The two steps that were taken while implementing the alternatives, and their impact was:

Step 1: Setting up Supply chain and logistics for the third state meant the coordination and management task had been increased for the team, increasing the total work for the process.

Step 2: The 2 member Digital marketing team was dedicatedly setup for this product , for which company had to bear $5000 every month, however in the long run this was a better approach in understanding the customer behaviour and doing product branding while increasing the sales through promotion.

For this step it was essential for the Human Resource team to find the 2 perfect fitting employees in terms of skill required and experience so that minimum time was wasted on their training.