In the context of System Engineering, active control based on cost, technical, or schedule status of a project.
In this context, “control” means that we’re paying attention to the projected technical adequacy of a CI, when we expect to turn it over to the customer, and how much they’ll have to pay for the privilege. If it looks like things aren’t going well in any of those three areas, we take corrective action in some or all of them.
Corrective actions might, or might not, be in the specific area where the deficiency is found. That is, we might take a corrective schedule action in order to buy time to fix a technical issue, to mitigate an unsupportable funding peak, or to constrain an unaffordable total cost.
The term is often used as a depersonalizing reference to the class of people that exercise executive control over one or more of the three domains. They’re more correctly referred to as “managers”.