More and more contracts in mining, energy and EPC require the schedule to "pass DCMA" before it is approved. Few planners know exactly what that means, and many find out when the client sends the program back with a list of comments. Here we explain what each of the 14 points measures, the threshold it uses, why it fails and how to fix it in Primavera P6 or MS Project.
What is the DCMA 14-Point Assessment?
The Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), an agency of the United States Department of Defense, published a list of 14 checks in 2005 to review its contractors' schedules. The list became the de facto industry standard: today it is required by owners of mining, oil and gas, and industrial projects across Latin America, and it appears as a requirement in EPC and construction management contract specifications.
It is important to understand its scope. The DCMA assessment measures the technical integrity of the schedule: whether the logic network is complete, whether the dates are consistent, whether the critical path is reliable. It does not measure whether the plan is good. A schedule can score 14 out of 14 and still have unrealistic durations or an impossible construction sequence. DCMA is the minimum hygiene; strategy comes afterwards.
The 14 points, one by one
The thresholds in the table are those published by the DCMA. When a threshold is "≤ 5%", it refers to the percentage of incomplete activities (or of relationships) that show the condition.
| # | Check | What it detects | DCMA threshold |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Logic | Activities with no predecessor or no successor (open ends) | ≤ 5% |
| 2 | Leads | Relationships with a negative lag | 0 |
| 3 | Lags | Relationships with a positive lag | ≤ 5% |
| 4 | Relationship types | Relationships that are not Finish-to-Start (FS) | FS ≥ 90% |
| 5 | Hard constraints | Mandatory dates (Must Start/Finish On, Mandatory) | ≤ 5% |
| 6 | High float | Activities with total float greater than 44 working days | ≤ 5% |
| 7 | Negative float | Activities with total float less than zero | 0 |
| 8 | High duration | Activities with remaining duration greater than 44 working days | ≤ 5% |
| 9 | Invalid dates | Actual dates in the future or forecast dates in the past | 0 |
| 10 | Resources | Activities with duration but no resources or cost assigned | 0 (if the contract requires resource loading) |
| 11 | Missed tasks | Activities that should have finished by the data date and did not | ≤ 5% |
| 12 | Critical path test | When a critical activity is extended by 600 days, the project finish must move by the same amount | Pass / Fail |
| 13 | CPLI | Critical Path Length Index: (critical path + float) / critical path | ≥ 0.95 |
| 14 | BEI | Baseline Execution Index: completed / planned to be completed | ≥ 0.95 |
Watch the count: points 1 to 11 are calculated only on incomplete activities and exclude milestones, summary activities and level of effort (LOE) activities. If your tool counts the whole schedule, your percentages will differ from the client's and the discussion never ends.
The three points that fail most often on Latin American projects
In the schedules we review, three points account for most rejections. They are not the hardest to understand; they are the most tempting to break when the contractual deadline does not add up.
Hard constraints to "force" the milestone
The contractual deadline does not work, so the planner puts a Must Finish On on the handover and the software obeys. The result is a fictitious critical path and hidden negative float. The honest fix is to remove the constraint, let the program show the real delay and resolve it with logic: run work fronts in parallel, shorten durations with more resources or renegotiate the milestone. If the contract requires the date, use a soft constraint (Finish On or Before) and report the negative float as a risk.
Lags that replace activities
"Concrete curing: 7 days" turned into a 7d lag between pouring and stripping formwork. It works in the calculation, but the lag has no name, cannot be reported, does not show up in the S-curve and nobody knows why it is there six months later. Convert every lag with a physical meaning (curing, procurement, transit, approval) into an activity with its own name and duration. Keep lags only for small technical overlaps.
Open-ended activities
An activity with no successor drives nothing: it can slip a year and the project finish does not move. With 10% of activities open-ended, the critical path you see on screen is a lie. Simple rule: every activity, except the project start and finish, has at least one predecessor and one successor. In P6, the Activities without successors filter lists them in seconds.
How to run the assessment in 5 minutes
There are three ways to do it, from slowest to fastest:
- By hand, with filters and Excel. Possible in P6 and MS Project, but it takes you an afternoon per schedule and it is easy to get points 12, 13 and 14 wrong.
- With the Primavera P6 Schedule Check. Since version 8.x, P6 Professional includes a report that covers a good part of the 14 points. Useful if you work only in P6 and know how to interpret the output. MS Project has no native equivalent.
- With Centinela DCMA, our online tool. You upload the file (.xer from P6, .mpp or .xml from MS Project), and in seconds you have the 14 points calculated with the exact list of activities that fail each one. It works without installing anything and serves both to review your own schedule and to audit a contractor's.
Auditor's tip: run the assessment on the schedule before the approval meeting, not after. A clean DCMA report attached to the submittal changes the tone of the review: you go from defending the program to discussing the plan.
What DCMA doesn't tell you
Passing the 14 points does not guarantee a good schedule. The assessment does not check whether durations are realistic, whether the construction sequence makes sense, whether resources are leveled or whether the program reflects the execution strategy agreed with the site team. Those questions require an engineering review, not a software one.
That is why we recommend using DCMA as a first filter: it removes the technical defects that make it impossible to discuss the plan, and then you can devote the meeting to what matters. AACE International's recommended practices for schedule planning and review are the natural complement for that second stage.
Checklist before submitting the schedule
- Every activity has a predecessor and a successor (except start and finish).
- Zero negative lags; positive lags have a written technical justification.
- Hard constraints only on contractual milestones, and documented.
- No activity with a duration greater than 44 working days that has not been split into work fronts.
- No actual date later than the data date.
- The critical path test (point 12) passes: the finish moves when you extend a critical activity.
- DCMA report attached to the submittal, with an explanation of every exception.
With that, the conversation with the client stops being about the quality of the file and becomes about the project. Which is where it should have been from the start.