What is the DCMA 14-Point Assessment?
The DCMA 14-Point Assessment is a set of 14 objective checks developed by the U.S. Defense Contract Management Agency to measure the structural quality of a project schedule. It does not judge whether the dates are realistic — it judges whether the schedule is built correctly enough to be believed. A schedule that fails these checks cannot reliably calculate a critical path, so its forecast dates and any delay analysis built on it are suspect.
It is the de-facto industry standard for baseline acceptance on EPC, oil & gas, defence and infrastructure projects worldwide.
The 14 checks and their thresholds
- Logic — activities missing a predecessor or successor should be under 5%. Open ends break the critical path.
- Leads (negative lag) — target 0%. Negative lag distorts the forward pass and hides float.
- Lags — relationships with positive lag should be under 5%. Excessive lag hides missing activities.
- Relationship Types — at least 90% should be Finish-to-Start. Too many SS/FF pairs signal manipulated logic.
- Hard Constraints — under 5%. Mandatory dates override logic and freeze the critical path.
- High Float — activities with total float over 44 working days should be under 5%. Usually a symptom of missing logic.
- Negative Float — target 0%. Any negative float means the schedule cannot meet a deadline as logically built.
- High Duration — activities longer than 44 working days should be under 5%. Long tasks hide progress and risk.
- Invalid Dates — no actual dates in the future, no forecast dates in the past relative to the data date.
- Resources — every activity with duration should carry cost or resource loading (where the schedule is resource-loaded).
- Missed Tasks — under 5% of baseline tasks should have slipped past their baseline finish.
- Critical Path Test — inserting a large deliberate delay on a critical activity must push the project finish. If it doesn't, the critical path is broken.
- Critical Path Length Index (CPLI) — should be ≥ 0.95. Measures how efficiently the critical path uses remaining time.
- Baseline Execution Index (BEI) — should be ≥ 0.95. The ratio of tasks completed to tasks that should have been completed.
How to read the results
Any single failure is a conversation, not a rejection — but a cluster of failures in Logic, Leads, Constraints and Negative Float together means the critical path is not trustworthy, and every downstream forecast is built on sand. That is exactly the pattern reviewers look for when they reject a baseline submittal.
Running the assessment on a P6 schedule
You can compute each metric by hand with P6 layouts and filters, but on a 2,000-activity schedule that is hours of work and easy to get wrong. Baseline Schedulytics reads the .xer or .xml directly and produces the full 14-point (and extended 22-point) scorecard with pass/fail status, calculated percentages, a Monte Carlo confidence band, and a clean Word narrative — offline, in seconds.
Run all 14 checks automatically
Baseline Schedulytics audits a P6 .xer against the DCMA 14-point and 22-point criteria and exports a pass/fail scorecard with a Word narrative — 100% offline.
See Baseline Schedulytics →