Now that you have been introduced to the components of CMMI models, you need to understand how they fit together to meet your process improvement needs. This chapter introduces the concept of levels and shows how the process areas are organized and used.

CMMI-ACQ does not specify that a project or organization must follow a particular acquisition process flow or that a certain number of deliverables per day or specific performance targets be achieved—only that they have processes in place for adequately addressing acquisition-related practices. To determine whether this is so, a project or organization maps its processes to the process areas contained in this document.

The mapping of processes to process areas enables acquirers to track their progress against the CMMI-ACQ model as they implement processes. It is not intended that every process area of the CMMI-ACQ will map one to one with a given organization’s or project’s processes.