The DCMA 14-Point Schedule Assessment Explained

The DCMA 14-point schedule assessment is a set of 14 pass/fail checks the Defense Contract Management Agency uses to test whether a CPM schedule's logic, dates, and float actually hold up, not just whether the Gantt chart looks complete. It was built for government contractors filing Integrated Master Schedules on defense programs. Outside that world, four of the fourteen checks predict schedule risk well enough that commercial PMOs run them with no contract requiring it at all.

The direct answer: the assessment scores a schedule against 14 thresholds covering logic, constraints, float, duration, and baseline performance. A schedule with more than 5% missing predecessor or successor links fails the Logic check; a Critical Path Length Index below 0.95 flags a schedule that will finish late without recovery action. Most commercial PMOs never need all 14, but Logic, Negative Float, High Duration, and CPLI generalize to any schedule, defense contract or not.

The 14 Checks and Their Pass Thresholds

#	Check	Pass threshold
1	Logic	5% or fewer of incomplete tasks missing a predecessor or successor
2	Leads (negative lag)	Zero tasks with negative lag
3	Lags	5% or fewer of relationships carry positive lag
4	Relationship types	At least 90% finish-to-start; start-to-finish links at 0%
5	Hard constraints	5% or fewer of tasks carry a hard constraint (Must Start On, Must Finish On, Start No Later Than, Finish No Later Than)
6	High float	5% or fewer of incomplete tasks show more than 44 working days of total float
7	Negative float	Zero tasks with negative float
8	High duration	5% or fewer of incomplete tasks exceed 44 working days in duration
9	Invalid dates	Zero tasks with actual or forecast dates that fall outside the schedule's status date logic
10	Resources	Every task of a day or longer carries an assigned resource (optional check in most tools)
11	Missed tasks	5% or fewer of tasks finish later than their baseline date
12	Critical path test	A forced delay on a test activity extends the finish date proportionally, confirming the network logic is real
13	Critical Path Length Index (CPLI)	1.0 or above is on pace; DCMA flags anything below 0.95
14	Baseline Execution Index (BEI)	1.0 or above means completed tasks are keeping pace with the baseline plan

Deltek's summary of the full assessment has the complete methodology behind each check if you're building this into a P6 or MS Project review process.

Which Four Checks Matter Most Outside a Government Contract

Ten of the fourteen checks assume something a commercial project usually doesn't have: a formally maintained baseline, an EVM cost account structure, or a government reviewer checking for contract compliance. Logic, Negative Float, High Duration, and CPLI don't require any of that. They test whether the schedule's network is real and whether it is trending toward its finish date, which every project manager needs regardless of what's driving the deadline.

Logic catches the single most common structural failure: tasks disconnected from the dependency network. A disconnected task doesn't show up on the critical path even when it should, so its slip goes unnoticed until it's already late.

Negative float is a zero-tolerance check for good reason. Negative float means a task's late finish date is earlier than its early finish date, which is mathematically only possible when a hard constraint or an already-slipped predecessor has broken the schedule's own math. Any negative float number means something in the schedule is lying to you. Both this check and check 6 (High float) filter on total float, the project-level number that falls out of the forward and backward pass; total float and free float measure different things, so a review that only tracks total float can still miss a task that is about to squeeze the very next task behind it.

High duration flags tasks planned as a single block longer than 44 working days. A task that long is usually several tasks in a trench coat: nobody can report meaningful progress on a 60-day block until it's either 0% or 100% done, which is exactly the blind spot that lets a schedule stay green until it suddenly isn't.

CPLI is the forward-looking check: it tells you whether the schedule's pace, not just its structure, is realistic.

How Do You Calculate the Critical Path Length Index?

CPLI = (CPL + TF) / CPL, where CPL is the critical path length remaining in workdays from the status date to the project's finish milestone, and TF is the total float on that critical path.

Take a project with 100 working days remaining on its critical path and 5 days of total float on that path: CPLI = (100 + 5) / 100 = 1.05. That schedule is ahead of pace and passes clean. Now take the same 100 remaining working days with -8 days of float, meaning the critical path has already slipped behind its own late dates: CPLI = (100 - 8) / 100 = 0.92. That fails DCMA's 0.95 threshold, and it fails for a reason worth taking seriously: the project would need to gain almost a full working day of progress for every eight it works just to get back to zero float, which rarely happens without an explicit recovery plan.

Where Real Schedules Fail First: Logic

Outside a formal DCMA audit, Logic is the check that fails hardest, and we have real numbers behind that claim. Our audit of 500 real-world Microsoft Project schedules found dangling tasks, tasks with neither a predecessor nor a successor, in 83% of the files we processed. DCMA's threshold for the Logic check is 5% of incomplete tasks, so the two numbers do not compare directly: 83% counts FILES carrying at least one dangling task, and a file with one dangler in two hundred tasks still passes. The comparable figure is the median file in that sample, which carried 17 dangling tasks against a median of roughly 190 tasks. That is about 9%, past the 5% line on its own, and it is measured on the stricter definition. Most schedules built outside a disciplined review process never had working logic to begin with.

The diagram below shows which four checks generalize to any schedule and which ten assume a formal government-contract baseline.

Running the Assessment Without P6 or a DCMA Contract

You don't need Primavera P6 or a government contract to run these four checks. In Microsoft Project, sort tasks by predecessor and successor columns to spot Logic failures, filter total float for negative values to catch Negative Float breaks, and filter duration for anything over 44 working days to catch High Duration. CPLI takes more manual work: pull total float on the current critical path and the remaining duration to the finish milestone, then run the formula above.

You no longer have to do any of that by hand. Import the schedule into Onplana and open Plan > Schedule Quality: all 14 checks are scored against the plan as it stands, not only the four above, on every plan including Free, with the flagged tasks one click away.

The free Schedule Health Check still doesn't score these DCMA thresholds against an uploaded file, but it finds the network problems behind a Logic failure without an account: tasks with no predecessor and no successor, milestones nothing leads into, and links to tasks that aren't in the file. It also marks the critical path and the tasks a day away from joining it, along with the other structural issues that don't carry a DCMA number but cause the same silent slip. For the commercial-PMO version of this checklist, seven checks before you share a plan overlaps this assessment on Logic, hard constraints and the critical path test, and adds resource overallocation, placeholder durations and baseline currency, which DCMA does not score. This post sits alongside the rest of the scheduling fundamentals coverage in the Onplana blog.

Run your schedule against the checks that matter Upload an .mpp or MSPDI XML file to the free Schedule Health Check to find disconnected tasks and see which work is on or near the critical path. No P6 license or DCMA contract required. → Run the Schedule Health Check

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