scope:

This Standard applies to the design, development, fabrication, test, and operation of commercial, civil, and military systems, sites, facilities, services, devices, and software that are used in ground, nautical, aeronautical, and space missions. Criteria is provided for rating the capability of the entire Safety, RMAT, and Quality Assurance (SR&QA) program or an individual SR&QA process, with regard to the identification, assessment, and elimination or control of unacceptable risks that threaten system safety or mission success. The capability rating criteria defined in this Standard identifies the activities needed to achieve a measurable improvement in the effectiveness of SR&QA risk management in stages. Organizations may evaluate their existing SR&QA program against the criteria in this Standard to identify the activities that need to be added, deleted, or modified to achieve the project's acceptable level of technical risk management effort. The phrase "acceptable level of technical risk" means that the activities and resources used to identify, assess, and eliminate or mitigate technical risks are commensurate with the product's unit-value/mission-criticality and system life cycle data content/maturity.

This Standard provides prescribed-tailoring of SR&QA programs that are capable of achieving the following objectives concurrently: (1) successful completion of project milestones; (2) effective mitigation of technical risks (i.e. optimally eliminating, reducing, controlling, transferring, avoiding, accepting, and monitoring risks); and (3) efficient improvement of the technical risk assessment process. See Figure C-1 for a notional view of this concept.