On Aligning the Properties of Standards with the Needs of Their Direct Users which are a kind of technical company standards (Vries & Slob, 2006). The company ORs are related to the "external" standards issued by the diverse Standards Organizations: SDO (Standards Developing Organizations), SSO (Standards Set- ting Organizations), consortia, and industry fora (Schoechle, 2003), but are not selfsame. Technical standards and the development tra- jectory (or a life-cycle) of technical artefacts are interrelated. The underlying idea of the product development process is to apply consecutive transformations to descriptions, towards a final outcome of the process ­ a product. Technical standards are used within the development process of the majority of complex technical systems to influence, guide and constrain the transformations, the descriptions being transformed, or both. This understanding is consistent with the well-known definition of a standard, formulated by ISO (ISO/ IEC, 2004). feedback to the development process, and eventu- ally ­ bring a change to the characteristics of a standard, if these prove to be inadequate. The aim of this study is to identify the deficien- cies of the current practice of formulating the ORs, and to propose improvements that concentrate on modifying the structure and notation of both the ORs and the external standards from which the ORs draw information. The proposed methodol- ogy for the development and use of ORs is called OpTeR (Brzeziski et al., 2008). The modifications on the part of a NO are fully realistic ­ they can be introduced by adopting OpTeR as a company meta-standard (i.e., a standard concerning stan- dards and standardization), and have been tried out successfully in a number of large projects. The change on the part of a Standards Organization is more problematic, but we provide arguments and precedents for a decision to extend the structure of standards with a new part (ECR ­ Embed-