Goals

Goals represent strategic objectives that an organization wants to achieve. Each goal has its own maturity model, allowing you to track progress from reactive practices to optimized, industry-leading capabilities.

Goal Structure

A goal contains:

• Identity: ID, name, description
• Ownership: Owner, priority
• Status: active, on_hold, completed, cancelled
• Timeline: Start date, target date
• Maturity: Current level, target level, and a complete maturity model

Goal Maturity Model

Each goal has its own 5-level maturity model that defines what it means to progress from Level 1 (Reactive) to Level 5 (Optimizing) for that specific goal.

Maturity Levels

Level	Name	Description
1	Reactive	Ad-hoc practices, no systematic approach
2	Basic	Basic practices in place, manual processes
3	Defined	Standardized processes, documented practices
4	Managed	Metrics-driven, SLOs actively monitored
5	Optimizing	Continuous improvement, industry-leading

SLO Requirements

Each maturity level specifies which SLOs must be met to achieve that level:

{
  "level": 3,
  "name": "Defined",
  "description": "SLOs tracked, incident response documented",
  "requiredSLOs": [
    { "metricId": "ops-availability", "description": "Production SLO" },
    { "metricId": "ops-mttr", "description": "Recovery time tracked" }
  ],
  "metricCriteria": [
    { "metricId": "ops-availability", "operator": "gte", "value": 99.5 },
    { "metricId": "ops-mttr", "operator": "lte", "value": 4 }
  ]
}

Level Achievement

A goal achieves maturity level N when:

1. All required SLOs are met - Each metric referenced in requiredSLOs must have MeetsSLO() == true
2. All metric criteria are satisfied - Each criterion's value requirement must be met

The system checks levels from 5 down to 1 and returns the highest level where all requirements are satisfied.

Example Goal

{
  "id": "goal-reliability",
  "name": "Achieve High Reliability",
  "description": "Build world-class reliability with elite SLO compliance",
  "owner": "VP Engineering",
  "priority": 1,
  "status": "active",
  "targetDate": "2026-12-31",
  "currentLevel": 3,
  "targetLevel": 5,
  "maturityModel": {
    "levels": [
      {
        "level": 1,
        "name": "Reactive",
        "description": "Frequent outages, no SLOs",
        "requiredSLOs": []
      },
      {
        "level": 2,
        "name": "Basic",
        "description": "Basic monitoring in place",
        "requiredSLOs": [
          { "metricId": "ops-availability" }
        ],
        "metricCriteria": [
          { "metricId": "ops-availability", "operator": "gte", "value": 99.0 }
        ]
      },
      {
        "level": 3,
        "name": "Defined",
        "description": "SLOs tracked, incident response documented",
        "requiredSLOs": [
          { "metricId": "ops-availability" },
          { "metricId": "ops-mttr" }
        ],
        "metricCriteria": [
          { "metricId": "ops-availability", "operator": "gte", "value": 99.5 },
          { "metricId": "ops-mttr", "operator": "lte", "value": 4 }
        ]
      },
      {
        "level": 4,
        "name": "Managed",
        "description": "Proactive monitoring, error budgets",
        "requiredSLOs": [
          { "metricId": "ops-availability" },
          { "metricId": "ops-mttr" },
          { "metricId": "ops-p99-latency" }
        ],
        "metricCriteria": [
          { "metricId": "ops-availability", "operator": "gte", "value": 99.9 },
          { "metricId": "ops-mttr", "operator": "lte", "value": 1 },
          { "metricId": "ops-p99-latency", "operator": "lte", "value": 200 }
        ]
      },
      {
        "level": 5,
        "name": "Optimizing",
        "description": "Self-healing systems, chaos engineering",
        "requiredSLOs": [
          { "metricId": "ops-availability" },
          { "metricId": "ops-mttr" },
          { "metricId": "ops-p99-latency" }
        ],
        "metricCriteria": [
          { "metricId": "ops-availability", "operator": "gte", "value": 99.99 },
          { "metricId": "ops-mttr", "operator": "lte", "value": 0.25 },
          { "metricId": "ops-p99-latency", "operator": "lte", "value": 100 }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

Linking Initiatives to Goals

Initiatives can be linked to one or more goals via the goalIds field:

{
  "id": "init-monitoring",
  "name": "Observability Platform",
  "goalIds": ["goal-reliability"],
  "phaseId": "phase-q1-2026"
}

Goal Progress Tracking

Calculate Achieved Level

level := goal.CalculateAchievedLevel(doc.Metrics)
fmt.Printf("Achieved: Level %d (%s)\n", level.Level, level.Name)

Check Requirements for Next Level

requirements := goal.RequirementsForLevel(nextLevel, doc.Metrics)
for _, req := range requirements {
    status := "Met"
    if !req.Met {
        status = "Not Met"
    }
    fmt.Printf("%s: %s\n", req.MetricName, status)
}

CLI Commands

# List all goals
prism goal list document.json

# Show goal progress
prism goal progress goal-reliability document.json

# Show all goals status
prism goal status document.json