You may also choose to use industry benchmarks, best practices, or standardized guidelines to help set your future state. For example, if you are performing a training needs analysis on your organization’s project management processes (a helpful tool when your workforce is being grouped into project teams but has never done any project management training), you might use a project management framework as your target.

In either case, here are some questions that can be used to narrow down the characteristics of the desired future state.

• What would the ideal outcome of this training be?
• What metrics and results will help us measure the success of this future state?
• How will activities, processes, and employee tasks look in this state?
• What will business results look like in this state?