Spacester, as Graucho Marks once said, "Congratulations, you just said the magic woid"....ISO9000. <br /><br />That and it's "quality" brotheren are the problem. NASA does ISO, Quality Circles, etc-etc. add nausium. They are costly, inefficent, report generators. (Only good for deforesting small South American countries.) The Malcom Baldridge Quality Award (another of the evil quality brothern) has driven a majority of it's recipents bankrupt. <br /><br />The great god Demming, and his followers are the cause of this morass which NASA and the aerospace companies find them selves in, not the politicians. (I never thought I'd hear myself say that.) <br /><br />Under ISO, normal engineering/management/production cycle is disrupted by placing the QA/QC department in the driver's seat. Not overtly of course, but it happens, the Bell-Boeing V22 is a case in point. "Those two companies have every quality program in existance, and the aircraft program is a mess," as one politician at the V22 congressional investigation said. "Explain to me just how did this happen?"<br /><br />When you approach your favorite Quality Consultant and ask about how much all this runs... He will inveriably mumble something about "the cost of quality." <br /><br />Maintaing the files, paper work, doing the audits, in briefs, exit briefs, internal survailance autits and so on cost big bucks. The bigger the endeavor the bigger the cost. Add to that the burden, the employees who are forced to do this junk, have to do it on top of their normal work load. They are pulled from their real job (the one they are hired to do) and given classes by the local external consultant, at "X" number of thousands of dollars a pop. <br /><br />One aerospace company I worked for, got suckered for just over 4 million bucks for a hand full of management classes and a box full of three ring binders. I hear from friends that most of the managers in those classes are gone from the company, and things are still a mess. <br /><br />