Senior-management-developed strategies designed to ensure an organization's continued existence and enhance its profitability, market share, and other factors influencing the organization’s success. (See “quantitative objective” and “quality and process-performance objectives.”)

Such objectives may include reducing the number of change requests during a system's integration phase, reducing development cycle time, increasing the number of errors found in a product’s first or second phase of development, reducing the number of customer-reported defects, etc., when applied to systems-engineering activities.

1. This glossary is from Appendix C of Technical Report CMU/SEI-2002-TR-004.
2. ® CMMI is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by Carnegie Mellon University.