DCMA 14 in plain English

A schedule is a promise about the future written in thousands of linked activities. The DCMA 14-point assessment — born in US defence programme management and now a standard across major infrastructure — is a health check on that promise. It doesn't tell you whether a plan is good; it tells you whether it's sound enough to believe. Here's each check in plain English.

Is the network wired up properly?

1. Logic. Almost every activity should connect to what comes before and after it. Dangling tasks with no links are a red flag — the schedule can't calculate a true finish date if activities float free.

2. Leads (negative lag). "Start this two days before that finishes" hides risk and distorts the critical path. Best practice: none.

3. Lags. Deliberate waiting time between tasks. A few are fine; a schedule stuffed with them is often masking missing detail.

4. Relationship types. The vast majority of links should be simple finish-to-start. A schedule leaning on exotic start-to-finish links is usually being forced to fit.

Is it being held together by string?

5. Hard constraints. "Must finish on" dates override the logic and freeze the schedule's ability to react. Minimise them — they turn a living plan into a wish.

6. High float. Activities with enormous slack (often 44+ working days) usually signal missing links, not genuine flexibility.

7. Negative float. The schedule is telling you it's already late against a constraint. Anything above zero needs a recovery plan, now.

8. High duration. Very long activities (60+ days) hide progress and risk. Break them down so status means something.

Do the dates and resources make sense?

9. Invalid dates. No actual work in the future; no forecast work in the past. Obvious — and surprisingly often broken.

10. Resources. If the plan is resource-loaded, activities should actually have cost or hours against them.

11. Missed tasks. How much has slipped past its baseline finish? A rising count is the earliest warning of trouble.

Can you trust the critical path?

12. Critical path test. Deliberately delay a critical activity and check the end date moves. If it doesn't, your critical path is broken — and every date downstream is suspect.

13. Critical Path Length Index (CPLI). A ratio of how efficiently the remaining critical path reaches the finish. Near 1.0 is healthy; below it, you're relying on catching up.

14. Baseline Execution Index (BEI). Are you completing tasks as fast as you promised? Below 1.0 means you're falling behind the plan you signed up to.

DCMA 14 doesn't grade ambition. It grades honesty — whether the schedule can be trusted to say what it means.

The point isn't the checks — it's doing them every week

Run by hand, a DCMA pass across a portfolio is a day of an analyst's life, so it happens monthly, if that. Automated, it runs on every update, on every project, and turns into a single trend you can steer by. That's exactly what Primer does — schedule integrity scored continuously, so your PMO stops compiling checks and starts acting on them.