The DCMA 14-point assessment is a common way to judge whether a CPM schedule is built well enough to rely on. Upload one Primavera P6 XER here and every check is run on it, with the activities behind each finding listed so they can be found and fixed in P6.
The checks
| No. | Check | Threshold |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Logic: incomplete tasks without a predecessor or successor | 5% or less |
| 2 | Leads: relationships with a negative lag | none |
| 3 | Lags: relationships with a positive lag | 5% or less |
| 4 | Relationship types: finish-to-start share | 90% or more |
| 5 | Hard constraints (Start/Finish On, On or Before, Mandatory) | 5% or less |
| 6 | High float: more than 44 working days | 5% or less |
| 7 | Negative float | none |
| 8 | High duration: more than 44 working days | 5% or less |
| 9 | Invalid dates: actuals after or forecasts before the data date | none |
| 10 | Resources: tasks without a resource assignment | information |
| 11 | Missed tasks: due by the data date, finished late or not at all | 5% or less |
| 12 | Critical path test | pass |
| 13 | CPLI: critical path length index | 0.95 or more |
| 14 | BEI: baseline execution index | 0.95 or more |
Counts are of incomplete tasks, leaving out milestones, level-of-effort and WBS summary activities. Dangling activities (a start nothing drives, or a finish that drives nothing) are listed as an extra check.
How some checks are worked out
- Durations and float are in working days of each activity's calendar.
- Missed tasks and BEI use the baseline project when the XER holds one, otherwise the planned finish dates stored with each activity.
- The critical path test checks that a chain of critical activities leads back from the last activity to work at the data date. The DCMA version adds a delay and recalculates; this tool reads the dates P6 stored and does not reschedule.
Beyond the 14 points
The report also lists the critical and longest path activities, out-of-sequence progress, the float distribution and every calendar in use with its work week and holidays. Everything comes as an HTML report, an Excel workbook and a CSV list of findings.
With two XER files of the same project the page compares the updates instead, and shows the health checks of both side by side: see comparing P6 schedule updates.
More about what this tool reads and writes: P6 Schedule Update Comparison (XER).