Your schedule says you will finish on time. It may even say you have weeks of float. But a schedule is a model, and a model only tells the truth if it is built to. Open ends, hard constraints, missing logic and progress that nobody verified can make a late project look healthy for months. By the time the dates finally move, the options are gone.
How schedules lie
- Open ends. An activity with no successor can slip forever without moving anything. Its delay simply disappears.
- Hard constraints. A "must finish on" date pins an activity in place. The schedule stops calculating and starts asserting.
- Leads and long lags. A negative lag or a 60-day lag hides work that should be modeled. It turns logic into guesswork.
- Float that never moves. If total float on the critical path is the same update after update, while the field is clearly struggling, the schedule is not being updated. It is being maintained.
- Progress without evidence. Percent complete that is estimated in a meeting instead of measured in the field inflates performance until it cannot anymore.
A schedule that never changes is not a sign of a healthy project. It is a sign that nobody is asking the schedule anything.
Schedule assurance lead, KonradBeck
What the DCMA 14-point check tells you
The DCMA 14-point assessment is a set of tests for schedule quality: missing logic, leads, lags, relationship types, hard constraints, high float, negative float, high durations, invalid dates, resources, missed tasks, critical path integrity, critical path length index and the baseline execution index. It does not prove a schedule is right. It tells you when to stop believing one.
A schedule that fails several checks deserves suspicion. One that passes all of them can still be wrong, because the checks test structure, not judgment. That is why we pair every health check with a reviewer who reads the logic against how the work will actually be built.
Three questions to ask at your next update
- What changed on the critical path, and why? If the answer is "nothing," ask how that is possible.
- How much float did we use this period? Float erosion is the earliest honest signal of delay. Track it like a budget.
- What did we forecast last time, and what happened? A team that compares forecast to actual every period learns quickly. A team that does not keeps making the same mistake.
Make the schedule tell the truth
A trustworthy schedule is not a better-looking Gantt chart. It is logic-driven, honestly updated, independently reviewed and reported with its weaknesses visible. That is what schedule assurance is for. If your schedule has been quietly reassuring for a long time, it may be worth asking someone independent to check what it is not saying.
