Nevermind that we spend more time conforming to arbitrary standards than we do developing money-making software.

If you can quantify this, and then translate it into dollars lost versus dollars saved, you'd have a case to bring to management to at least reduce the frequency of changes if not reduce the number of changes altogether.

Example:

• how many minutes per day do you spend making changes to conform to standards?
• how many minutes are spent by the committee reviewing and changing the standards?
• how many people are in the committee?

1. measure these items over the course of one month.
2. compute the number of hours
3. compute the amount of money spent by multiplying the hours by the average hourly wage (you'll have to figure this out yourself)
4. multiply this number by 12 to get the yearly estimated cost

here's the kicker, ask them how much of this money being spent is benefiting the customer!

HTH

--
hiseldl
What time is it? It's Camel Time!