Electronic Industries Alliance

Electronic Industries Alliance/Interim Standard

A party that ultimately uses a delivered product or that receives the benefit of a delivered service. (See also “customer.”)
End users may or may not also be customers (who can establish and accept agreements or authorize payments).
In contexts where a single service agreement covers multiple service deliveries, any party that initiates a service request can be considered an end user. (See also “service agreement” and “service request.”)

The full composition of a company. (See also “organization.”)
A company can consist of many organizations in many locations with different customers.

States of being that must be present before an effort can begin successfully.

A target staging, created using the continuous representation that is defined so that the results of using the target staging can be compared to maturity levels of the staged representation. (See also “capability level profile,” “maturity level,” “target profile,” and “target staging.”)
Such staging permits benchmarking of progress among organizations, enterprises, projects, and work groups, regardless of the CMMI representation used. The organization can implement components of CMMI models beyond the ones reported as part of equivalent staging. Equivalent staging relates how the organization compares to other organizations in terms of maturity levels.

Create, document, use, and revise work products as necessary to ensure they remain useful.
The phrase “establish and maintain” plays a special role in communicating a deeper principle in CMMI: work products that have a central or key role in work group, project, and organizational performance should be given attention to ensure they are used and useful in that role.
This phrase has particular significance in CMMI because it often appears in goal and practice statements (though in the former as "established and maintained") and should be taken as shorthand for applying the principle to whatever work product is the object of the phrase.

An informative model component that provides sample outputs from a specific practice.

(See “senior manager.”)

States of being that must be present before an effort can end successfully.

CMMI components that describe the activities that are important in achieving a required CMMI component.
Model users can implement the expected components explicitly or implement equivalent practices to these components. Specific and generic practices are expected model components.