What is the DCMA 14-point assessment?
The DCMA 14-point assessment is a set of 14 metrics developed by the U.S. Defense Contract Management Agency to measure the quality and reliability of a CPM schedule — independent of whether the project is on time.
It has become a de-facto standard for schedulers, general contractors, owners, and delay-claims consultants to answer one question: can we trust this schedule?
A schedule can show a perfect finish date and still be junk underneath — missing logic, artificial constraints, impossible float. The 14-point check surfaces exactly that.
The 14 checks (with thresholds)
Below is each check, what it measures, and the commonly cited passing threshold.
| # | Check | Target | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Logic | ≤ 5% | Activities missing a predecessor or successor. Dangling activities break the critical path. |
| 2 | Leads (negative lag) | 0 | Relationships with negative lag. Leads distort the forward pass and hide true dates. |
| 3 | Lags | ≤ 5% | Relationships using positive lag. Excessive lag is often logic hidden as a number. |
| 4 | Relationship types | ≥ 90% FS | Share of Finish-to-Start links. Too many SS/FF links make logic hard to defend. |
| 5 | Hard constraints | ≤ 5% | Activities with hard date constraints. Hard constraints override logic and mask slippage. |
| 6 | High float | ≤ 5% | Activities with total float greater than 44 working days. Usually a symptom of missing logic. |
| 7 | Negative float | 0 | Activities with total float below 0. Negative float means the plan is already impossible as built. |
| 8 | High duration | ≤ 5% | Activities longer than 44 working days. Long tasks hide detail and progress. |
| 9 | Invalid dates | 0 | Forecast dates in the past or actual dates in the future. A sign the schedule wasn't statused correctly. |
| 10 | Resources | All assigned | Activities with cost or hours but no resource assigned (resource-loaded schedules). |
| 11 | Missed tasks | ≤ 5% | Activities that finished late versus the baseline. Measures execution against the plan. |
| 12 | Critical path test | Intact | Does an intentional delay on a critical activity push the finish date? Proves the network is actually connected. |
| 13 | CPLI | ≥ 0.95 | Critical Path Length Index — efficiency needed to finish on time. Below that, you're relying on catching up. |
| 14 | BEI | ≥ 0.95 | Baseline Execution Index — rate of completing tasks versus the baseline plan. A leading indicator of slippage. |
Why it matters (beyond passing a check)
Defensibility
In a delay claim, a schedule that fails logic, constraint, and float checks is easy for the other side to discredit. A clean 14-point profile is a credibility asset.
Trust
When the team stops believing the plan, it stops following it. Quality is what keeps the schedule alive.
Early warning
CPLI and BEI move before the finish date does — they tell you you're slipping while you can still react.
How to run a DCMA 14-point assessment
Manually
You can compute each metric in Primavera P6 with layouts, filters, and global changes, then tally the percentages by hand. It works, but it's slow, error-prone, and has to be repeated every update cycle.
Automatically
Upload your .xer file to a tool that runs all 14 checks at once and returns a score. This is what most schedulers and claims consultants do today so they can spend their time fixing the schedule instead of measuring it.
Run your DCMA 14-point check in seconds
Grupo AE — Schedule Intelligence reads your Primavera P6 (.xer) schedule and returns a full DCMA 14-point assessment, a 0–100 quality score with a letter grade, and forecast metrics (CPLI, BEI, SPI) — with snapshot history so you can track quality over time.