3GPP Work Plan

General description

The Work Plan is a living document, aiming at providing co-operations between all the 3GPP TSGs and WGs to help them reaching common targets.

These targets are called “Features”, and are new or substantially enhanced functionality which represents added value to the existing system. A feature should normally embody an improved service to the customer and / or increased revenue generation potential to the supplier. The features are divided into “Building Blocks”, a BB being a set of technical functionality which would generally be expected to reside in a single system element, i.e. a single physical or logical entity or a single protocol. The Building Blocks are divided into “Work Tasks”, a WT being by definition handled by a single Working Group. The output of a work task is the creation of one or more new Technical Specifications (or Reports) and / or Change Requests to existing TSs / TRs. (These definitions are extracted from SP-000109.)

This tree structure is established to ease the monitoring of the 3GPP work progress for R00, and to make explicit the purpose of the work assigned to one WG in the global system.

A Work item is a generic term to refer to a feature, building block or work task, i.e. all the lines of the Work Plan are work items. A full description of the a work item can be found in the 3GPP Working Procedures, available at http://www.3gpp.org/About_3GPP/3gpp_wp.zip .

The Work Plan is provided in the form of a Gantt chart: the left part contains the names and attributes of the Work Items, the right part contains a calendar view reflecting the work progress (blue and grey lines apply to foreseen tasks, black lines for completed tasks).

The indentation of WI names reflects the hierarchical level in the tree structure (Features, Building Blocks, and Work Tasks).

Attributes applicable to a Work Item

From the Work Plan perspective, a WI is fully characterised by the following set of attributes:

1. Unique ID
2. Name
3. Release (based on the completion date). It applies to non-splitable features. If the feature is splitable, it applies to each individual Building Block composing the feature, provided that the Building Blocks are non-splitable. It does not apply to Feasibility Studies, Testing nor Charging Activities.
4. Splitable: defines whether the WI has to be considered as a single block or if it can be realised onto different releases
5. Acronym
6. Resource name: defines the responsible WG or TSG
7. Modified (see next section)
8. Modified since last TSG (see next section)
9. Start
10. Finish
11. % completed
12. Impacted TS and TR
13. Approval Level: MCC<CHAIR<WG<TSG. Each level can delete the proposal from the levels bellow. Only TSG Approved Wis are officially approved. All the other Wis are proposals, more or less stable according to the approval level.
14. Last modif, containing the date of the last modification. Note: this field has been recently added. The value has been initialised to April, 1^st.
15. Hyperlink (to the proposed/approved WI coversheet)
16. WI rapporteur name
17. WI rapporteur e-mail
18. MCC responsible: defines who in MCC is responsible in monitoring the overall Feature.
19. Notes (free field).

The fields Start, Finish and % completed are calculated for summary tasks.

For better readability, only some of these attributes are shown in the PDF views.

How the changes on the Work Plan are tracked?

The changes are tracked at two level: a global one, stressing out the overall changes of the Work Plan, and a more detailed one, making use of the “notes” field.

Global level

The global level is a text of some paragraphs listing the main changes. For readability reasons, the global level is not part of the MS Project Work Plan but is contained in this present Work Plan cover page.

The global level shall at least:

• Report creation and deletion of Features and Building Blocks. It is not requested to mention the creation and deletion of Work Tasks (but this can be done if judged relevant by the MCC responsible person).

The global level is updated before each set of plenary meetings.

Detailed level

The detailed level is a set of comments provided in the “notes” field text of each modified WI (a WI is identified by its Unique ID).

Even at the “detailed level”, not all the modifications have to be mentioned: some fields are by nature subject to constant updates (e.g. “% completed”), so it would be a waste of time to keep track of these changes.

The fields subject to change tracking are the following ones:

• Name
• Release
• Splitable (defines whether the WI has to be considered as a single block or if it can be realised onto different releases)
• Acronym
• Resource name (defines the responsible WG or TSG)
• Finish date

The other ones listed bellow are not subject of change tracking. Change tracking on these ones is up to the MCC responsible person. These are:

• % completed
• Impacted TS and TR
• Level of Approval (MCC<CHAIR<WG<TSG).
• Hyperlink (to the proposed/approved WI coversheet)
• WI rapporteur name
• WI rapporteur e-mail
• MCC responsible: defines who in MCC is responsible in monitoring the overall Feature.
• Notes (free field).
• Start date

The detailed level is updated each time a line is modified or created. In addition, a new field called “last modif” has been created (initialised to April, 1st) to provide the date of the latest modification of the WI.