Five Symptoms of an Unhealthy Schedule (And the DCMA Checks That Catch Them)
Most schedule failures are visible in the network long before they hit the field. The DCMA 14-point check surfaces them in under an hour.
The Defense Contract Management Agency's 14-point schedule assessment is the closest thing the industry has to a standard health check. Five of the fourteen catch the majority of real-world quality problems.
1. Missing Logic
Activities without predecessors or successors are floating in the network and contribute false confidence to dates.
2. Negative Lag
FS lags with negative duration are almost always a workaround for missing logic.
3. High Float
Activities with > 44 days of total float commonly indicate broken logic, not slack.
4. Hard Constraints
Start-on or finish-on constraints freeze dates and hide the true critical path.
5. Critical Path Test
Inserting a 600-day delay on a single activity should shift the project finish by 600 days. If it doesn't, the network is broken.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Five Symptoms of an Unhealthy Schedule (And the DCMA Checks That Catch Them)" about?
Most schedule failures are visible in the network long before they hit the field. The DCMA 14-point check surfaces them in under an hour. It sits within the Schedule Quality stream of PMMilestone Research & Insights and is written for practising project management and project controls professionals.Who is the intended audience for this Schedule Quality article?
Planning engineers, project controls engineers, cost engineers, project managers and owner-side advisors working on capital construction, infrastructure and power projects. The article assumes working familiarity with CPM scheduling, EVM and risk management.Who authored this research article?
Dr. Hassan Eliwa, PhD — Founder of PMMilestone.org, senior planning and project controls engineer with 17+ years of international field experience and a PhD from Massey University (New Zealand).Which calculators and templates pair with this article?
The EVM Calculator, SPI Calculator, CPI Calculator and Schedule Health Checker on PMMilestone.org cover the formulas referenced here. Companion templates (risk register, EVM workbook) are linked from the relevant sections.What is a common misconception this Schedule Quality article corrects?
That headline SPI and CPI numbers can be read at face value. On real schedule quality programmes, schedule performance must be assessed using Earned Schedule SPI(t) past ~70% progress, and CPI is only reliable after 15–20% physical progress. The article walks through how to apply these caveats in practice.Where can I find related research and definitions?
Use the PMMilestone Encyclopedia A–Z for canonical definitions of every term referenced in the article, and the Research Articles index for adjacent long-form pieces.What are Dr. Hassan Eliwa's research areas relevant to "Five Symptoms of an Unhealthy Schedule (And the DCMA Checks That Catch Them)"?
Dr. Hassan Eliwa's published research areas — owner-side project controls maturity, forensic delay analysis, earned schedule reliability on long-duration projects, and quantitative schedule-risk modelling — frame the analysis here. The full author profile and publication list live on the author page.