Drop in a Primavera P6 .xer or Microsoft Project .xml export and get all fourteen checks scored — with the actual activities behind every failure, not just a percentage. The file never leaves your browser.
Primavera P6 .xer or MS Project .xml (File → Save As → XML). Up to about 20,000 activities.
The DCMA 14-Point Schedule Assessment is a set of fourteen quantitative tests published by the US Defense Contract Management Agency. It asks one question: is this schedule built well enough to be believed? It says nothing about whether the project is going well — a beautifully constructed schedule can describe a project that is nine months late.
That distinction is the whole value of it. Before you argue about a forecast date, the 14 points tell you whether the network is capable of producing one. A schedule with 22% of its activities missing successors cannot flow delay through to the completion milestone, so its finish date is decoration.
It has spread well beyond defence. Principal contractors, government infrastructure clients and independent certifiers now routinely require a 14-point check with each monthly programme submission, and the thresholds below are the ones almost all of them use.
| # | Check | Threshold | What a failure means |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Logic | ≤ 5% | Activities with no predecessor or no successor. Delay cannot flow through them, so they float free of the plan. |
| 2 | Leads (negative lag) | 0 | A successor allowed to start before its predecessor finishes. Compresses the schedule artificially. |
| 3 | Lags | ≤ 5% | Waiting time buried in a relationship instead of modelled as an activity you can progress. |
| 4 | Relationship types | ≥ 90% FS | Too many SS/FF links make the network hard to trace. Start-to-finish links are nearly always an error. |
| 5 | Hard constraints | ≤ 5% | Dates that override logic. Slip stops propagating and hides in negative float instead. |
| 6 | High float | ≤ 5% | Total float over 44 working days. Usually a symptom of missing logic, not genuine slack. |
| 7 | Negative float | 0 | The schedule is already late against its own constraints and has no valid path to the date. |
| 8 | High duration | ≤ 5% | Remaining duration over 44 working days. Too coarse to progress or forecast honestly. |
| 9 | Invalid dates | 0 | Forecast work sitting in the past, or actuals recorded in the future. The schedule has not been statused. |
| 10 | Resources | 0 unresourced | Activities with duration but no resource or cost. Nothing to level, nothing to cost-forecast. |
| 11 | Missed tasks | ≤ 5% | Activities finishing later than their baseline finish. The first honest signal of slippage. |
| 12 | Critical path test | Path holds | Inject a 600-day delay into a driving activity; the completion date must move by roughly the same amount. |
| 13 | CPLI | ≥ 0.95 | Critical path length index. Below 0.95, the schedule must outperform its own plan to hit the date. |
| 14 | BEI | ≥ 0.95 | Baseline execution index. Below 1.0, the project is completing work slower than the baseline assumed. |
Checks 6 and 8 both use the same 44-working-day threshold — roughly two calendar months, the point at which a scheduler stops being able to say anything useful about what is happening inside an activity.
For what each check is really testing, what a failure tells you, and how to fix it in P6 or MS Project, see the full guide: the 14 DCMA checks explained.
Hours per working day matters: P6 and MS Project both store float and duration as hours or minutes against a calendar, and this tool converts them using the value you pick above. If your schedule runs a 10-hour day, set it to 10 or every duration reads 25% longer than it is.
Three checks need data most exports leave out, and this tool reports them as not assessed rather than passing them by default. Missed Tasks and BEI need baseline dates; the Resources check needs resource or cost assignments. A tool that scored those as "pass" because it found nothing to fail would be flattering you.
Check 12 is the honest exception. The full DCMA critical path test means injecting a 600-day delay into a driving activity, recalculating, and confirming the completion date moves with it. Nothing that only reads a file can do that. What runs here is the structural half — whether an unbroken chain of zero or negative float activities actually connects the data date to the completion milestone, which is where broken critical paths usually show up. Run the 600-day test in P6 or MS Project itself.
And the assessment as a whole tests construction, not performance. Fourteen green ticks on a schedule that is four months behind is a well-built record of being four months behind.
Fourteen quantitative checks from the US Defense Contract Management Agency that test whether a schedule is constructed well enough to be trusted — logic, leads and lags, relationship types, constraints, float, durations, dates, resourcing, baseline performance and critical path integrity.
No. The file is parsed by JavaScript in your own browser and never sent to a server. Open your network inspector while you run it and you will see no request carrying the file.
Missed Tasks and BEI need baseline dates, and the Resources check needs resource or cost assignments. If your export does not contain them, those checks cannot be scored — and reporting them as passes would make a thin export look like a good schedule.
There is no official overall pass mark; each check stands alone. Failing three or fewer is generally reasonable. Failures on logic, negative float and the critical path test matter most, because they decide whether the schedule can forecast anything at all.
No. The 14 points measure how the schedule is built, not how the project is going. Use them to decide how much to trust the dates, then use earned value and float trends to judge the project.
No — .mpp is a binary format that browsers cannot read. In MS Project use File → Save As and choose XML Format (*.xml), then drop that file in.
Aegis takes the same P6 or MS Project export every period and turns it into the thing the client actually asks for: cost and schedule performance, float erosion, milestone slip and a written status report — without the spreadsheet in between. See how P6 reporting works in Aegis.
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