Schedule Health Check

A schedule can be wrong before anything goes wrong

A schedule’s dates are only as good as its construction. An activity with no successor can slip forever without moving the finish. A lag hides waiting nobody manages. A date typed in as a constraint overrides the logic and makes the critical path lie. None of this shows in a Gantt chart that looks fine, which is why schedule reviewers run the same checks on every schedule they receive.

The fourteen checks

The US Defense Contract Management Agency published a fourteen-point assessment for reviewing contractor schedules, and it has become the common checklist far beyond defense work: missing logic, leads, lags, the share of finish-to-start links, hard constraints, high float, negative float, long activities, invalid dates, resources, missed activities, a critical path test, and two indexes of how the work is going against plan. Each is run here with the published default threshold, and every threshold can be changed, because a six-week office move is not a ten-year program. This tool is not affiliated with that agency, and a result here is not an official assessment.

Findings, not a grade

A score out of fourteen tells you there is a problem; it does not tell you what to fix. Every check here lists the activities behind it, with the reason: which link has the lead, which constraint is hard, which activity was due in the baseline and has not finished. The whole list downloads as a spreadsheet, so it can go straight to whoever maintains the schedule.

Beyond the fourteen

The assessment does not cover everything that breaks a schedule. Loops, where activities wait on each other in a circle, make dates impossible to calculate. Links to activities that are not in the file, or to summary tasks, are quietly dropped by some software. Progress recorded out of order means either the logic or the status is wrong. A milestone or a constraint date on a weekend or holiday is usually a mistake. These are checked too.

What this does not do

It checks how a schedule is built, not whether the plan is realistic: a perfectly constructed schedule can still have durations nobody believes. It does not read resource assignments from Project or P6 files yet, so the resource check needs a spreadsheet with people or costs. Its float and dates come from this site’s own critical path calculation, which can differ slightly from the software that wrote the file, and the page says how.