Statement of Objectives (SOO)
A Statement of Objectives (SOO) is a brief government document stating top-level acquisition objectives and desired outcomes, leaving offerors free to propose their own technical approach and performance work statement in response.
The SOO flips the drafting burden: the government states its goals in a few pages, and each offeror answers with a proposed solution — usually including a contractor-drafted PWS that becomes part of the contract at award. It is the least prescriptive of the three work-description documents and suits acquisitions where industry knows more about the solution space than the buying office does.
The discipline a SOO demands is evaluability. Because every offeror proposes something different, evaluation criteria must be written to compare unlike approaches fairly — which is where SOO-based competitions most often go wrong.
Regulatory Reference
FAR 37.602(c)
RFO Status
The Part 37 model deviation relocates SOO coverage to 37.102-1(a)(1), keeping the rule that the SOO does not become part of the contract; 37.602(c) remains the citation in the published FAR.
Category
Documents & Artifacts
How AcqBot Helps
AcqBot builds SOOs from mission-level objectives and generates evaluation criteria designed to score dissimilar solutions consistently, keeping the competition defensible.
Related glossary entries
Justification & Approval (J&A)
A Justification & Approval (J&A) is the formal document required by FAR 6.303 to justify awarding a federal contract without full and open competition, citing one of seven statutory exceptions and approved at thresholds based on dollar value.
Performance Work Statement (PWS)
A Performance Work Statement (PWS) describes required outcomes and measurable performance standards for a services acquisition rather than prescribing how the work must be done, enabling contractors to propose their own methods under performance-based acquisition.
Statement of Work (SOW)
A Statement of Work (SOW) is the contract document that prescribes, in specific and directive terms, the tasks a contractor must perform, the deliverables due, and the schedule — placing responsibility for the approach on the government.
Independent Government Cost Estimate (IGCE)
An Independent Government Cost Estimate (IGCE) is the government's own documented estimate of what a requirement should cost, developed without contractor input, used to validate budgets, evaluate price reasonableness, and support negotiation positions.