What is the DCMA 14-point schedule check?

Where it came from

In 2005 a US defence memo required an integrated master schedule on contracts above $20 million, and the Defense Contract Management Agency was told to work out how to evaluate one. It produced fourteen checks. They were never ratified as a standard — the documentation is essentially an online training course — but the scheduling software implemented them, and they became the industry’s default schedule health check by adoption rather than by decree.

That history is worth knowing before you make a passing score contractual, because it was never designed to be one.

What the fourteen actually test

Broadly, three things: whether the network is sound, whether the dates are calculated rather than imposed, and whether the contractor is executing to the plan.

• Network soundness — logic (no more than 5% of tasks missing a predecessor or successor), leads (none allowed), lags (no more than 5%), relationship types (at least 90% finish-to-start), and a critical-path test: add a large delay to a critical activity and the finish date must move with it.
• Dates calculated, not imposed — hard constraints (no more than 5%), invalid dates (nothing forecast before the data date, nothing actual after it), high float (no more than 5% above 44 working days), negative float (none), high duration (no more than 5% above 44 working days).
• Execution against plan — missed tasks (no more than 5% finishing later than baseline), BEI (tasks completed ÷ tasks that should have been completed; target 1.0), CPLI (how much efficiency is now needed to finish on time; target 1.0). Resources is reported as a ratio and has no pass mark at all — a detail most summaries get wrong.

Why a passing score is not a good programme

The checks are cheap, fast and genuinely useful, and they catch things a scheduler can hide in plain sight. They also have limits that anyone using them contractually should understand.

Take float. The high-float check fails a schedule with too many slack activities — so an owner who makes it a contractual gate has, in effect, instructed the contractor to reduce float. The contractor does that by tying activities together more tightly than the work requires. The programme now passes. It is also more brittle, with less slack to absorb the next disruption, and the protocol’s principal commentator makes the point plainly: an owner who requires a contractor to lower their float values is increasing their own exposure to later delay claims. The 44-day threshold itself is arbitrary — it was chosen because it is roughly two months.

Use the fourteen as what they are: a mechanical filter that tells you where to look. The looking is still the job.