Don Firth -

Regarding some twenty-five years ago ..., I have some significant bit of experience with those "impenetrable governese boilerplate" documents, and can fully sympathize. While I can't say anything about the ones you worked with, the ones I was required to "finish" for particular uses for aircraft are quite similar, I'm sure.

It takes at least six years experience with them for a very bright writer who starts out with the technical skills to understand what is needed in the hardware and processing before it starts to become clear why they're written as they are, and what specific things each of the "required" parts of the boilerplate are supposed to accomplish. Once a "new writer" is assigned the actual writing of one, review by someone more experienced is a very good idea for a while, because it usually takes another five or six years of "practice writing" to learn how to coordinate with "procurement" and "purchasing" agents who have to "implement" the boilerplate so that their "deficiencies in skills" are accommodated, before anyone can know how to "get it all really right." Most organizations that try to use the "spec forms" have virtually no one "in control" with the needed understanding, so you get no help.

When EA (forcibly) transferred me to a program that was supposed to create a new airplane, the existing group had been given a year to select vendors and an additional year to get the "first parts" tested and approved. I arrived 27 months after the "kickoff" and was assigned seven moderately complex parts that management "forgot they needed." One of their "managers" had rewritten the standard boilerplate, and everyone had been ordered to use his "clarification."

Since I had previous acquaintance with the manager who did the rewrite, and knew that he was an idiot, I used the original "MIL-STD-..." boilerplate. They gave me two "young engineers" to assist, neither of whom had any applicable experience. There were approximately 30 other "groups" in the department essentially identical to mine, each responsible for about the same kinds of hardware, but all with (at least) a two year head start on us.

Aside from an immediate supervisor whose only skill was at "sucking up to higher management" my group had few real difficulties and two years after I arrived the airplane took off for its "first flight."

In part because I had used "the boilerplate" correctly (I think) my group was the only one of the thirty in the "hydraulics design department" having all our parts "on the airplane," doing what they were supposed to do, with all required testing completed, and all the paperwork done.

In the majority of cases I've seen, the boilerplate can work. But it ain't really easy. Much of what's in most such skeletons are there to tell everyone what to do about problems that "probably won't happen," but in every moderately complex program there will always be one or two that do happen, so the "plate" needs to cover them all.

The "boilerplate" we used mandates a minimum of 27 pages just to put all the required sections in the document, and even if it's just to add a "NOT APPLICABLE" for the section, the section should be there so that knowledgeable users will know where to find everything else. One of our devices took about 115 pages when all the "flesh" was added, but it happened to be the one where the "least common problem" popped up, and I would have had no way to solve it with the "clarified" form demanded by the resident idiot. It was easily solved because I could put my finger on the paragraph and say "it says here... ." I suspect "resident idiot" is the one most responsible for none of the other groups getting the job done, but the total absence of training - to explain why the boilerplate is there and what it's supposed to do - was the real problem; and there was no evidence anyone in "management" had a clue.

(That airplane is probably considered slightly obsolescent now, about 20 years later, although they still sell quite a few. One of my "young engineers" learned quite a bit, and may be still doing something useful - somewhere. The other never learned much but had good "brown lips" so he's probably still there, doing about the same.)

John