Milestones and Time periods
Business milestones are usually useless in the description of standard forecasts as they are not developed by the designer team but supplied by external organizations (for example NAF is defined by the NATO and HTML is defined by the W3C).
So, even though milestones can still be defined in standard master plans, it is recommended that you only have a few of them representing the very big steps in the standard evolution and that you set the start and end dates on the periods to match the different states of the standard.
Customization
Similarly to any time-dependent item, a specific state machine can be created with a set of customer-defined states.
This machine can then be attached to the standard metaclass if it applies to any standard (verify that the designer has the appropriate rights to see the metaclass) or directly to a specific standard.
If defining a new set of states, check that all the defined states are classified via the three stereotypes:
• "Preparation",
• "Production"
• "Retirement".
The Setup tab of a behavior item allows you to set the metaclasses that can be associated to the states. For more information, see the HOPEX Planning user manual, "Describing a Master Plan" chapter, "Object life cycle status" paragraph.The NTV-2 Report Template
The NTV-2 report template produces a report with chapters that give a graphical understanding of the evolution of the standards in relation to planned systems of the architecture.
The template uses two parameters to generate the report chapters:
• The first parameter is the Architecture which indicates the architecture to be analyzed.
• The second parameter, Master Plan Subset, is optional. This parameter indicates the master plans to be analyzed. Groups of master plans are considered in reports to enable plan comparisons. If no master plan is set, all the master plans of the architecture are taken into account and the collected master plans are compared individually.
The NTV-2 Standards Forecast Chapter
This chapter presents a view of the standards in a Gantt chart.
This chart provides a detailed representation of the possible conflicts that may occur during the evolution of the standards and the systems planned in the NSV-8 subview or the technologies defined in the NSV-9 subview.
The NTV-2 Standard Forecast Description Chapter
The technical standard forecast description chapter displays a table with milestones as column headers and Standards in rows. The states occupy the cells between the standards and the milestones.
This chapter is particularly useful when the NTV-2 master plan is also an aggregation of a sub-master plan. In this case the table displays the standards as they are planned in the sub-master plans.
It is also very useful when it shows the potential availability conflicts between standards and other dependent items.