In October 1983, a committee of executives from a group of the nation's major aerospace companies began a study to determine the feasibility of forming a consortium to attack escalating software costs and related issues. Software production problems are immense (and growing). No one company has the resources ( in terms of money and especially in terms of people) to effectively achieve broad integrated solutions. Each concerned company had internal software productivity improvement programs but no single company's programs were sufficiently broad and concentrated to offer realistic prospects for dramatic success. Accordingly, an organization separate from the sponsoring companies was proposed to bring together a highly skilled blend of personnel who could concentrate their efforts specifically on software productivity. A 5-yr effort with additional 5-yr incremental options was defined to address this problem. The resulting Software Productivity Consortium (SPC) is the topic of this paper.