Acquisition Engineering (CMMI-ACQ)

The Acquisition Engineering (CMMI-ACQ) category contains practices that address acquirer activities related to executing and ensuring the transition of an acquisition project.

The Acquisition Engineering category contains the following Acquisition Engineering process areas:

• Acquisition Requirements Development (ARD) (CMMI-ACQ)
• Acquisition Technical Management (ATM) (CMMI-ACQ)
• Acquisition Verification (AVER) (CMMI-ACQ)
• Acquisition Validation (AVAL) (CMMI-ACQ)

Customer needs are established and translated into customer requirements. The set of customer requirements is prioritized and a set of contractual requirements, including design constraints, is developed.

Development of contractual requirements and operational scenarios also depends on the acquisition strategy developed using Project Planning practices. This set of contractual requirements is used in Solicitation and Supplier Agreement Development practices to select suppliers and establish a supplier agreement to acquire the product or service. The product or service is designed and implemented by the supplier consistent with the acquirer’s contractual requirements and design constraints.

Acquisition Technical Management practices are used to combine the project’s defined process and risk management activities to perform technical and interface management. This management includes activities such as managing the technical evaluation of selected supplier products and services, conducting technical reviews with the supplier, and managing selected interfaces throughout the project’s lifecycle. Acquisition Technical Management practices, Agreement Management practices, and the Project Monitoring and Control practices are all used in concert, as they all contain reviews that are conducted throughout the project.

Using Acquisition Verification practices ensures that the acquirer’s selected work products meet specified requirements. Using Acquisition Verification practices also enables the acquirer to select work products and verification methods to verify acquirer work products against specified requirements.

Acquisition Verification practices also are used to address peer reviews. Peer reviews are a proven method for removing defects early and provide valuable insight into the work products and product components being developed and maintained by the acquirer.

The acquirer uses Acquisition Validation processes to ensure that the products or services received from the supplier will fulfill the relevant stakeholders’ needs. Products and services are incrementally validated against the customer’s needs.

Validation can be performed in the operational environment or in a simulated operational environment. Coordination with the customer on the validation requirements is an important element of this process area.

The scope of the Acquisition Validation process area includes the validation of products, product components, selected intermediate work products, and processes. These validated elements can often require reverification and revalidation. Issues discovered during validation are usually resolved using Acquisition Requirements Development practices or by working with the supplier through the supplier agreement and technical reviews.

As mentioned above, Integrated Project Management processes establish a defined process and integrated plan for managing all the activities of the project. These activities include all project processes described above, from Project Planning through Acquisition Validation. The organization’s set of standard processes and other process assets provide critical guidance to projects for establishing a defined process and plan. How the organization creates and deploys such process assets for use by the whole organization, along with other forms of critical project support, is the subject of the next section.