Scheduled Health
& DCMA
SCHEDULED HEALTH AND DCMA
The US Defense Contract Management Agency implemented a 14-point schedule assessment to help the Department of Defense evaluate the enormous volume of contracts and schedules they were tasked with managing. The DCMA’s 14-point Schedule Assessment has become a guideline that is widely used for project schedulers to check the project schedule health.
The 14 metrics are not set as necessary rules or standards but more as measurable criteria that are advisable to be analyzed They are intended to indicate potential problems in the project schedule.
Power Project Control enables you to easily check the health of the project schedule within powerbi.
14 POINTS DCMA CHECK
Logic
The metric ‘Logic’ provides the possibility for measurement of the ‘%’ of incomplete tasks with no predecessors and/or successors, also called ‘dangling’ activities. For this metric, it is preferable that the number of unfinished activities missing predecessors and/or successors don’t exceed 5%.
Leads
‘Leads’ is the control criteria that helps measure the ‘%’ of tasks that have a negative lag between each other. The term designates the overlapping time between two activities in the project schedule.
The leads in the schedule should equal zero, therefore there shouldn’t be tasks with a negative lag between each other.
Lags
it allows an evaluation of the ‘%’ of project activities that have a positive lag between each other. The metric actually indicates the time calculated when a certain activity starts after the finish date of its predecessor. The threshold for this metric shouldn’t be greater than 5%.
Relationship Types
It is recommended that 90% of the project schedule activities are of a finish-to-start type (FS). The finish-to-start type of relationship stands for ‘Activity A must be completed before activity B can begin’. This type of relationship between particular tasks is the foundation of the Waterfall method used in project management.
Hard Constraints
Under ‘Constraints’ in a project schedule are identified Hard Constraints (Mandatory Start and Mandatory Finish) and Soft Constraints (As Late As Possible, Start On, Start On or Before, Start On or After, Finish On, Finish On or Before and Finish On or After).
DCMA recommends 5% of the constraints used, be Hard Constraints because they can provoke problems in the schedule. Hard Constraints can prevent the schedule to be logic-driven and create negative lags.
High Float
This metric measures the ‘%’ of unfinished tasks with a total float greater than 44 working days. The percentage of total incomplete tasks doesn’t exceed 5%.
This metric represents the time that an activity can be delayed without affecting negatively the project milestones and/or the estimated time for project completion.
Negative Float
DCMA threshold for this metric is zero, therefore it is required that regular checks and reviews of the project schedule are executed. The Negative Float, or Slack, should be avoided, and, if tasks with a large amount of negative float are noticed, they should be mitigated.
High Duration
This metric provides the possibility to monitor and control the duration of tasks and it requires that no task should last longer than 44 working days. If it is detected that the percentage of incomplete tasks with a duration beyond 44 days is above 5% it is preferable to examine if it is achievable to decompose them in distinct tasks.
Invalid Dates
The metric for Invalid Dates analyses both forecast and actual dates of project activities. An activity is considered to have invalid dates if it has forecast start/finish dates in the past or actual start/finish dates in the future.
‘Invalid dates’ is a very critical metric, therefore the goal is not to surpass 0%
Resources
The metric for ‘Resources’ is the most open-ended on the list. DCMA recommends that all project schedules are resource-loaded, but additionally, it allows some schedules to not include resources at all.
However, for those who are using this metric DCMA asks to not exceed the limit of 0%
Missed Tasks
The metric for ‘Missed Tasks’ can cause or prevent the project to fall far behind. It assists in measuring the schedule performance in parallel to the baseline plan. Particularly, the number of missing tasks can indicate how well or badly the project schedule meets the baseline schedule. DCMA holds that the number in question shouldn’t exceed 5%
Critical Path Test
This test focuses on assessing the integrity of the schedule’s network logic. Firstly it is identified as a critical activity and its remaining duration. The next step is intentionally extending the duration of this activity for 600 days. The last step is recalculating the schedule dates and identifying if the date for completion of the project is extended for the same number of days applied to the critical activity.
If the project completion date is not delayed for the same amount of days (600 days) it means that somewhere in the schedule exists broken logic which may be a result of missing predecessor and/or successor activities.
Critical Path Length Index (CPLI)
The Critical Path Length Index (CPLI) presents the measure of the efficiency necessary for completing a milestone on assigned time. CPLI evaluates the integrity of the overall network logic and measures the ‘realism’ of completing a project successfully.
It is preferable that the CPLI equals 1.00, which means that the project must be completed within the planned time. A CPLI that is below 1.00 indicates that the project is inefficient.
Baseline Execution Index (BEI)
The Baseline Execution Index (BEI) test is a metric for evaluating schedule performance in parallel with the baseline plan but it focuses on the project’s team productivity in the process of executing activities.
DCMA for the Baseline Execution Index (BEI) test, the acceptable limit is 1.00, which indicates that the project team is performing well and according to plan.
DCMA CHECK VISUALS
With a rich set of visuals PPC enables you to have a total overview of all your project schedules.
You can run and visualize the DCMA assesment per project, as well as per any level of your EPS strcuture or portfolio.
The Threshold could be set per dashboard. This enables you using diffefent thresholds per type of project as not all checks in the DCMA are usefull for all projects.
The kpi shows the threshold per DCMA check inclusing the actual value
DCMA CHECK ANALYZE IN EXCEL
PPC uses the power of the microsoft power platform. This means that the dashboards and visuals easily integrates with other Microsoft products like Teams and Excel.
Analyze in excel connects to the PPC DCMA model and let men create pivot tables and ad-hoc analysis.