What a Primavera P6 schedule health check finds

A Primavera P6 schedule can look perfect on a Gantt chart and still be useless. If the logic is broken, the critical path is wrong, and the finish date is a guess dressed up as a calculation. A schedule health check finds those problems before an owner, a claims consultant or a missed milestone does.

The industry yardstick

Most schedule reviews start from the DCMA 14-point assessment, a set of checks developed by the U.S. Defense Contract Management Agency that has become a common reference for CPM schedule quality. It is not a law of physics, and some projects have good reasons to break a threshold, but it is a fair, repeatable starting point.

What we look for

1. Broken or missing logic

Activities with no predecessor or no successor (open ends) let dates float freely, so delays never ripple through. The usual target is no more than 5% of incomplete activities missing logic, with only the start and finish milestones open.

2. Leads, lags and odd relationships

Negative lags (leads) hide overlap and should be avoided. Long positive lags often stand in for real work that should be its own activity. Most relationships should be finish-to-start; heavy use of start-to-start and finish-to-finish links makes the critical path hard to trust.

3. Hard constraints

"Must start on" and "must finish on" constraints override the logic. A few are legitimate, such as a contract milestone or a permit window. Dozens of them mean the schedule is being typed in, not calculated.

4. Float that makes no sense

Very high total float usually means missing successors. Negative float means the schedule already says you cannot make a date, and someone needs to know. Both are flags, not automatic failures.

5. Activities that are too long

Long activities hide the work inside them and make progress hard to measure. The DCMA guideline flags incomplete activities longer than 44 working days, roughly two months.

6. Progress problems

Actual dates in the future, remaining work in the past, activities progressed out of sequence, and a data date nobody updated. In P6 we also check whether the schedule runs on retained logic or progress override, because the choice changes what the critical path shows.

7. Baseline and resources

Is there a baseline assigned, and is it the right one? Are resources or costs loaded where the contract requires it? Are the calendars real, including shifts, holidays and turnaround hours?

8. Does the critical path actually work?

The simplest test: add a delay to a critical activity and see whether the project finish moves by the same amount. If it does not, the critical path is broken somewhere, no matter what the colour coding says.

What you get back

• A short scorecard against the 14 checks, with counts and examples.
• A prioritized fix list: what to fix first and why it matters.
• Notes on anything that would weaken the schedule in a delay claim or an owner review.

Getting help

Our Estimating & Scheduling team builds and maintains schedules in Primavera P6, and our P6 schedule health check is a fixed-price starter offer. Send us the XER file and we send back the scorecard and fix list. Book a free consult to get started.