scope:

Purpose

This document provides guidance for managing the complete life cycles of problems, nonconformances, and anomalies. Program and project managers are the primary audience.

This handbook is primarily designed to provide a description of technical data management and support processes. The document also provides an overview of the problem management process and a means to track problems within a program or project. Finally, this handbook provides guidance on methods and techniques for assessing and analyzing problems and provides suggestions for reporting and documenting problems for recurrence control.

This document should be used by the program or project manager as the primary reference for establishing and implementing systems or processes for the management of problems, nonconformances, and anomalies.

Applicability

a. This handbook may be used by all NASA Centers, Programs, Projects, ..., as a reference for establishing and implementing systems or processes for the management of any problems, nonconformances, and anomalies which NASA has lead involvement and control or has partial involvement with control over design or operations via U.S. internal or international partnership agreements. This document has no automatic exclusions for any program or project due to limited funding, responsibility, or involvement of NASA in the program or project. NASA involvement includes design, manufacture, or funding of instruments, systems, hardware, software, operations, and processing.

b. This handbook has been designed to be cited in contract, program, and other Agency documents as a reference for guidance.

c. Within this handbook, the word "shall" which normally indicates a mandatory requirement is NOT used within the text. However, in the Examples, the word "shall" indicates places where mandatory requirements should be used in contractual documents. The word "should" indicates a suggested implementation, the word "may" indicates an optional implementation.