DCMA 14-Point P6 Schedule Assessment in Excel

Perform DCMA 14 Point Schedule Assessment of a Primavera P6 Schedule right from the Activity layout in excel.

Yes! All the 14 Checks. No need to export relationships and no VBA codes used. Just Copy, Paste and Refresh data into the provided MS-Excel Sheet (Download link is provided at end of the article).

Primavera P6 EPPM Web Schedule Check option can evaluate 12 out of 14 metrics (Critical Path Test and CPLI are skipped). Those who don't have access to P6 web can you use this excel sheet for DCMA 14-Point Schedule Assessment.

Two Major Challenges faced while developing this excel sheet

1. Getting Activity Relationships

It has been solved with Power Query to transform activity predecessor and successor details into activity relationships. Thanks to PQ

Power Query is changing the way we work with Excel

2. Critical Path Test (12th Metric of DCMA)

Critical path test is used to check integrity of a network logic and it is stated as

DCMA: "If the project completion date is not delayed in direct proportion to the amount of intentional slip that is introduced into the schedule (critical path activities) as part of this test, then there is broken logic somewhere in the network"

STAT (Schedule Test and Assessment Tool, Developed by NASA): "The module selects all critical tasks along with any task that is in progress and adds 600 days to the remaining duration and then looks at the impact to the task/milestone"

Increasing remaining duration for each critical activity and checking the slippage of the project finish date in P6 will require huge amount of time and may think of external software to perform this task.

But the fact is that you can easily identify such activities in Primavera P6 itself

Here is the trick just filter out the "Critical Activities + Dangling activities" and "Critical Activities + Hard Constraint activities"

Activity Count Vs Timeline Chart

A graphical presentation of a total number of activities occurring in a particular month with critical and dangling activities.

This Chart is inspired by Santosh B. . Check his article for amazing Schedule Diagnostics charts.

Some other useful simple charts have been introduced in the excel file.

Click here to Download the Excel file for DCMA 14 Metric Checks.

Special Thanks to Mirza Aslam Baig, Mohammed Mujeebuddin & Awais Khan for Verifying the AZR DCMA 14 excel results with Primavera P6 EPPM results.

Feedback, Suggestions & Improvement are always welcome