There seems to be a widespread malaise in the whole of the Aerospace Industry (or is it the economy in general?) and Customer Community, where despite masses of well meaning but futile effort being put into Project Management, and ever more complex processes and procedures, we are unable to break the death spiral of increasing costs with reducing capability.
This isn't just happening in the UK, as an example the F35 is also in serious trouble (see latest in Wired:
Things Could Get Worse for Troubled Stealth Jet | Danger Room | Wired.com ). We could all quote other examples across many countries and organisations. Possibly the most significant common factor is the over-enthusiastic application of Business Management techniques, giving us the volatile mixture of top heavy organisations which have 8 coxes and 1 rower rather than 1 cox and 8 rowers, coupled with a naive and over-optimistic expectation of easy success.
I wish I could come up with a magic bullet, but change for the better can only start if there is recognision that there is a fundamental problem which needs to be addressed, rather than settling for cowardly conformity (or would that be called "Best Practice"?).