Objectives, Outcomes, Performance Gaps, and Acquisition Strategy
How to choose a real organization, structure your analysis of whether the acquisition met its objectives, evaluate success or failure with specific evidence, and tackle the hardest part — identifying a performance gap and building a credible acquisition strategy argument.
IT acquisition assignments look straightforward on the surface — pick an organization, describe what they bought, say whether it worked. But the questions underneath that surface are more demanding than they appear. You are being asked to evaluate a complex organizational decision against stated objectives, reason about success or failure with evidence, and then articulate something genuinely difficult: what makes identifying a performance gap and building an acquisition strategy so hard in practice. This guide walks through how to approach all three parts without padding or vague generalities.
What This Guide Covers
What Counts as an IT Acquisition
Before you can write anything useful, get clear on what the assignment is actually asking you to describe. IT acquisition is not just “buying software.” It is a formal process by which an organization obtains the technology systems, infrastructure, platforms, or services it needs to operate — whether through purchasing, licensing, contracting, or developing through a vendor relationship.
Software and Platforms
ERP systems (SAP, Oracle), CRM platforms (Salesforce), cloud migrations (AWS, Azure), EHR systems in healthcare, LMS platforms in education. Any software deployment at organizational scale.
Infrastructure and Hardware
Data center upgrades, network overhauls, device procurement at scale, server infrastructure replacements. Physical IT assets acquired through formal procurement processes.
Contracted IT Services
Managed service agreements, IT outsourcing contracts, cybersecurity services, cloud-based SaaS subscriptions acquired through a formal vendor selection process.
Students often assume they need a billion-dollar government IT project. You do not. A regional hospital deploying a new patient scheduling system, a university rolling out a new student information platform, or a mid-size logistics company moving its operations to cloud-based fleet management software — all of these are legitimate IT acquisitions for this assignment. What matters is that the organization had stated objectives, made a deliberate procurement decision, and the outcome can be evaluated against those intentions.
How to Choose Your Organization
The instruction says “an organization you know about.” That phrase is doing real work. It does not mean you need insider access — it means you should pick one where you can find enough credible information to write specifically rather than generally.
Good Choices for This Assignment
- Organizations with publicly documented IT projects — government agencies, publicly traded companies, healthcare systems, universities
- High-profile IT implementations covered by trade press: SAP rollouts, failed NHS IT projects, FBI Sentinel system, Healthcare.gov launch, VA electronic health records
- Your own workplace or a workplace you have direct knowledge of — use general descriptions to avoid confidentiality issues
- Cases with both pre-implementation objectives on record and post-implementation evaluations, audits, or news coverage
- Organizations where failure or partial success is documented — these give you far more analytical material than a clean success story
Choices That Will Make This Harder
- Small private companies with no public documentation — you will have nothing to cite
- Organizations where you only know the outcome and not the original objectives — evaluating objectives requires knowing what they were
- Acquisitions so recent that analysis is not yet available
- Cases where you are relying entirely on memory or secondhand anecdote — your analysis needs to be evidenced, not impressionistic
- Choosing a “success story” just because it is easier to write — partial success and failure cases require more analysis but produce stronger assignments
How to Describe the Acquisition
Your description sets up everything that follows. It needs to be specific enough to ground your analysis but not so long that it crowds out the evaluation. Think one to two paragraphs of factual context.
Name the Organization, the System or Technology Acquired, and the Time Frame
Identify the organization type, the specific IT system or service acquired, when the acquisition decision was made, and when implementation was completed or abandoned. Specificity matters: “a hospital” is less useful than “a 600-bed regional hospital system that deployed Epic EHR across three facilities beginning in 2019.”
Explain What Problem the Organization Was Trying to Solve
Every IT acquisition starts with a recognized need. What was the organization trying to fix or improve? Outdated legacy systems? Disconnected data across departments? Compliance requirements? Scalability limits? This is the foundation for evaluating whether the acquisition met its objectives — you cannot evaluate objectives you have not established.
Describe the Acquisition Process Briefly
Was it a competitive procurement? A sole-source contract? An internal build-versus-buy decision? A vendor-selection process? One sentence on process is enough — this signals to your reader that you understand the acquisition had procedural structure, not just a buying decision.
State the Scale — Budget, Users, Departments Affected
Scale contextualizes the complexity of what you are evaluating. A $2 million ERP deployment affecting 50 users is a very different challenge than a $400 million government system serving 30,000 employees. Your analysis of what went right or wrong will be more credible if the reader understands what the organization was dealing with.
Evaluating Whether Objectives Were Met
This is the analytical core of your first question. The organization had stated reasons for acquiring the technology. Did those reasons get fulfilled?
| Common IT Acquisition Objective | What Evidence to Look For | What Partial or Failed Outcomes Look Like |
|---|---|---|
| Improve operational efficiency | Processing time reduction, headcount changes, cost-per-transaction metrics, throughput data | System adopted but manual workarounds persist; efficiency gains in some departments but not others |
| Reduce IT costs | Total cost of ownership comparisons, license cost reduction, infrastructure consolidation data | Initial costs exceeded budget; maintenance costs offset savings; shadow IT persists alongside the new system |
| Improve data quality and access | Reporting capability improvements, data error rates, decision cycle time | Data migrated but quality issues carried over; siloed data replaced by a different silo structure |
| Meet compliance requirements | Audit findings, regulatory certification, compliance scorecard changes | Compliance achieved in some areas but gaps remain; system certified but user practices non-compliant |
| Improve user productivity | User adoption rates, task completion time, help desk volume, user satisfaction surveys | Low user adoption; resistance from frontline staff; productivity dip in transition period that never recovered |
| Modernize legacy infrastructure | Retirement of legacy systems, downtime reduction, system integration metrics | Legacy systems not fully decommissioned; integration failures; parallel systems running indefinitely |
Analyzing Success, Failure, or Partial Success
Most IT acquisitions are not clean wins or clean losses. Partial success — where some objectives were met and others were not — is the most common outcome, and it is also the most analytically interesting. Do not force your case into a binary.
Successful Acquisition — How to Argue It
To argue that an acquisition was successful, you need more than “the system went live on time.” Success means the technology delivered measurable improvements against the original objectives within reasonable cost and timeline parameters, and those improvements persisted. State the objectives, provide evidence that they were met, and acknowledge any limitations or compromises — a strong success argument is not the same as saying everything went perfectly.
Watch for: Survivorship bias — organizations tend to publish success stories more than failure analyses. If your only sources are the vendor’s press releases and the organization’s own communications, your analysis is missing the critical perspective.Failed Acquisition — How to Argue It
IT project failure usually has multiple contributing factors, not one cause. Common failure drivers include requirements misalignment (the system built was not the system needed), poor change management (users never adopted it), scope creep (the project expanded beyond what was manageable), vendor performance problems, or inadequate governance. Identify the two or three most significant factors with evidence, and explain how they interacted — failure is almost never a single cause.
Watch for: Hindsight bias. Failed IT projects always look obviously flawed in retrospect. Your analysis should acknowledge what was reasonable at the time the decisions were made, not just critique decisions from the position of knowing how it ended.Partial Success — Usually the Most Honest Assessment
Partial success means some objectives were achieved and others were not. The structure for this: identify which specific objectives were met (with evidence), identify which were not (with evidence), and then explain the structural or organizational reasons for the divergence. Why did the acquisition work for some outcomes and not others? Partial success analysis is stronger than all-or-nothing framing because it reflects how real IT acquisitions actually unfold.
Example structure: “The acquisition achieved its compliance objective and reduced data processing time by X%, but failed to meet its cost reduction target due to underestimated implementation complexity and ongoing dual-system maintenance costs (cite source). User adoption in field operations remained below 60% two years post-implementation (cite source).”Frameworks to Support Your Analysis
Your analysis will be stronger if it is grounded in a recognized evaluative model. Pick one and apply it — do not just name it.
GAO IT Investment Management (ITIM)
Five maturity stages from ad hoc investment control to portfolio optimization. Useful for evaluating how rigorously an organization managed the acquisition process, not just the outcome. Available at GAO-04-394G.
DeLone and McLean IS Success Model
Evaluates six dimensions: system quality, information quality, service quality, use, user satisfaction, and net benefits. Well-suited for evaluating whether an acquired system delivered its intended value to users and the organization.
PMBOK / PRINCE2 Evaluation Criteria
Evaluates acquisition outcomes against scope, schedule, cost, quality, and stakeholder satisfaction. Useful for framing why a specific IT project overran its timeline or budget and what governance failures contributed.
Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)
Focuses on perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use as predictors of user adoption. Particularly useful if your analysis involves low user adoption rates or resistance to the new system.
Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR)
The governing framework for U.S. government IT procurement. If your organization is a federal or state agency, FAR compliance (or non-compliance) is a central dimension of your acquisition analysis.
Return on IT Investment (ROTI) Analysis
Frames the acquisition as an investment with expected and actual returns. Useful when the organization’s stated objectives included cost savings or revenue improvement and the evidence allows financial comparison.
Dropping “I will use the DeLone and McLean model” into your assignment without actually applying the model’s dimensions to your specific case is not analysis. For each dimension of whichever framework you choose, say what the evidence shows in your organization’s acquisition. That application is what earns marks. If the system quality was high but user satisfaction was low, that specific divergence is your analytical finding — not just a reference to the model.
Identifying the Performance Gap
A performance gap is the measurable difference between current state and desired state — between where the organization’s IT capability is now and where it needs to be to meet its strategic or operational objectives. Before you can have an acquisition strategy, you need a clearly defined gap.
The current state is not “the old system was slow.” It is: what the existing system can and cannot do, measured against operational requirements. Processing speed, data accuracy rates, system availability, integration capability, compliance status, user capacity. The more specific your current state description, the more credible your gap identification will be. Vague current states produce vague gaps, which produce unconvincing acquisition strategies.
The desired state is anchored in what the organization actually needs, not just what a vendor is selling. It should connect directly to strategic objectives: compliance requirements, service delivery targets, efficiency benchmarks, security standards. The desired state needs to be defined before you go looking for a system to fill it — organizations that define the desired state after selecting a vendor end up with acquisition strategies that are reverse-engineered justifications, not genuine needs analyses.
State the gap explicitly: what the organization currently cannot do that it needs to be able to do. Or what it can do but not at the required level of performance, security, scale, or reliability. That gap statement is what the acquisition strategy has to address. Everything else — vendor selection, build vs. buy analysis, procurement approach, implementation planning — follows from a clearly defined gap. If the gap is fuzzy, the strategy will be fuzzy, and the acquisition will have an unclear target.
Developing a Tentative Acquisition Strategy
A tentative acquisition strategy is a preliminary plan for how the organization intends to fill the identified performance gap through a formal IT procurement or development process. It is not a full procurement plan — it is the strategic framing that guides what kind of solution to seek and how.
What a Tentative Acquisition Strategy Includes
- A statement of the performance gap the strategy is designed to address
- A build vs. buy vs. lease vs. partner decision and rationale
- The procurement approach — open competition, sole source, GSA schedule, competitive negotiation
- Key technical and functional requirements that any solution must meet
- Timeline and phasing considerations
- Risk factors and how they would be managed
- Success criteria — how the organization will know if the acquisition has closed the gap
Questions the Strategy Has to Answer
- What is the organization actually trying to achieve with this acquisition?
- What constraints exist — budget ceiling, timeline, regulatory requirements, integration needs?
- What is the risk tolerance? High-stakes acquisitions need more rigorous vendor vetting and contract protections.
- What stakeholders need to be involved in requirements definition?
- What does post-implementation success look like, and how will it be measured?
- What is the transition plan for existing systems and users?
What Makes This the Hardest Part — and Why
Your assignment explicitly asks you to identify the most challenging aspect of performance gap identification and acquisition strategy development, and explain how it could be improved. This is the part where most students write the least interesting answer — usually “communication between stakeholders” or “requirements gathering is hard.” Those answers are not wrong. But they are generic. Here is how to make your response specific and analytically credible.
Establishing a Credible Baseline for the Current State
You cannot define a gap without measuring where you are now. The problem is that most organizations do not have clean, current, measurable documentation of their existing IT performance. Data is scattered across systems, departments track performance differently, and frontline users often work around official metrics. When the baseline is vague or contested, the gap is guesswork — and an acquisition strategy built on guesswork will specify the wrong solution, at the wrong scale, for the wrong problem.
How this could be improved: Structured pre-acquisition IT performance assessments — using standardized capability maturity models or functional performance audits — before any acquisition conversation begins. The baseline should be documented and agreed upon by stakeholders before requirements are written, not reverse-engineered from a vendor’s capabilities matrix after they have been selected.Separating What Users Want From What the Organization Needs
Requirements gathering pulls in two directions. Users ask for features. Procurement asks for cost efficiency. IT asks for integration compatibility. Leadership asks for strategic alignment. These demands are not always compatible, and the performance gap can look very different depending on whose perspective is defining it. A gap defined primarily by end users will produce a different acquisition strategy than one defined primarily by IT architecture teams or compliance officers. Without a structured process for reconciling these perspectives, the gap statement becomes a political document rather than a technical one.
How this could be improved: Structured stakeholder analysis before requirements definition, with explicit prioritization criteria — what the system must do, what it should do, and what would be nice to have. The GAO’s ITIM framework addresses this through its investment control processes at Stages 2 and 3, where agencies are expected to define mission needs before technology solutions.Defining the Future State Without Anchoring It to a Specific Product
This one is subtle but important. Organizations sometimes write acquisition strategies that are functionally specifications for a product they have already decided to buy. The desired state is written around a vendor’s feature list rather than the organization’s actual operational needs. That inverts the process. When that happens, the performance gap is not a genuine analysis — it is a justification for a decision already made. The acquisition strategy fails before procurement even begins because the requirements were not grounded in organizational need.
How this could be improved: Technology-neutral requirements documentation — describing what the system needs to do in functional and performance terms, not in terms of how a specific product works. Having independent subject matter experts review draft requirements before they go to market helps catch cases where requirements have been written to fit a solution rather than define a genuine gap.The assignment asks for the most challenging aspect. Pick the one that resonates most with your chosen organization’s case and argue it directly. A paragraph that genuinely develops one challenge — with a real example, a clear explanation of why it is hard, and a specific improvement suggestion — is worth far more than three generic sentences on three different issues. Depth over breadth, every time.
Common Mistakes in This Assignment Type
Describing the Acquisition Without Evaluating It
Half the assignment involves description — what the organization acquired, what its objectives were. But students often spend most of their word count on description and very little on evaluation. If your analysis of whether the objectives were met is one paragraph, you have not answered the assignment.
Let Description Set Up Analysis — Then Do the Analysis
Keep your description tight and specific. Then spend proportionally more time evaluating outcomes against objectives, identifying what drove the result, and developing your argument about the performance gap and strategy challenges. The ratio should be closer to 30% description and 70% analysis.
Saying the Acquisition Was “Partially Successful” Without Saying Which Parts
“The acquisition was partially successful” without specifying which objectives were met and which were not is not analysis. It is a hedge. Reviewers look for specific claims supported by specific evidence, not general impressions.
Name the Objectives One by One and Evaluate Each
If the organization had four stated objectives, evaluate all four. Did this acquisition improve performance? Yes for objectives 1 and 3, no for 2 and 4, here is the evidence. That structure is both easier to write and easier to grade — it shows clear analytical thinking applied to specific claims.
Writing About Performance Gaps in the Abstract
“Organizations often struggle to identify performance gaps because of poor communication.” That is a textbook sentence, not an assignment answer. It has no organization, no specific gap, no evidence, and no connection to the acquisition you described earlier in the paper.
Ground the Challenge in Your Specific Case
The performance gap challenge question should connect directly to the organization you described. If the NHS IT project failed partly because requirements were vendor-led rather than needs-driven, that is your example of what makes acquisition strategy development hard. Your answer to the third question should feel like it could only have been written about this organization’s acquisition.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Three questions. Each one builds on the one before it. Your description of the acquisition sets up your evaluation of the objectives. Your evaluation of the objectives sets up your analysis of success or failure. And your analysis of success or failure should inform your answer about what makes the performance gap and acquisition strategy hard — because the challenges you name should be visible in the real case you described.
The assignments that score well do not necessarily pick the most dramatic acquisition or the most famous IT failure. They pick a case with enough documented evidence to support specific claims, stay concrete rather than general throughout, and connect the third question back to the first two. That coherence — description feeding analysis feeding reflection — is what separates a strong response from a collection of loosely related paragraphs.
Keep the description tight. Spend more time on the evaluation. Make the performance gap and strategy argument specific and grounded. And cite your evidence.