DOD Defense Contract Management Agency

In its role as the DOD executive agent for earned value management systems (EVMS), the Defense Contract Management Agency’s (DCMA) mission includes conducting contractor surveillance on EVMS.46 The outcome of DCMA surveillance ensures that reported contract performance data accurately reflect the status of programs.

In assessing contractor schedule reliability, DCMA ensures that the following ANSI/EIA-748 EVMS guidelines are followed:

  • Schedule the authorized work to describe the sequence of work and identify significant task interdependencies required to meet the requirements of the program.

  • Identify physical products, milestones, technical performance goals, or other indicators that will be used to measure progress.

In its assessment of the quality of a schedule, DCMA uses a 14-Point Assessment (14PA), a collection of measures intended to assess the technical structure of the schedule as well as the contractor’s ability to plan and execute work. The measures are:

  1. Logic
  2. Leads
  3. Lags
  4. Relationship types
  5. Hard constraints
  6. High float
  7. Negative float
  8. High duration
  9. Invalid dates
  10. Resources
  11. Missed tasks
  12. Critical path test
  13. Critical path length index
  14. Baseline execution index.

Several include thresholds; for example, no more than 5 percent of remaining tasks should be missing predecessor or successor logic. However, DCMA’s 14PA thresholds are not compliance triggers. Rather, they are used as a starting point toward an objective analysis of the schedule.

A GAO and a DCMA schedule assessment have inherently different purposes. Notably, DCMA’s review focuses on contractor adherence to ANSI standards and contractual data deliverables. This difference affects to some extent the applicability of best practices discussed in the Schedule Assessment Guide. For example, when assessing whether a schedule includes all effort, DCMA ensures that only scope that is on contract is included in the contractor’s schedule. In addition, DCMA ensures that resources are properly loaded in a schedule only if a contract requires resource-loaded schedules. Finally, schedule risk analyses (SRA) are not included as part of the EVMS guidelines. Therefore, DCMA does not assess whether an SRA has been performed unless one is required by contract.

Otherwise, we found few substantive differences between best practices detailed in the Schedule Assessment Guide and the DCMA 14PA and other DCMA documentation.

Salient differences are that, first, DCMA assessments allow unlimited use of soft date constraints, while the Schedule Assessment Guide recommends minimizing and justifying their use. Second, DCMA procedures do not describe guidelines for ensuring that SRAs are conducted properly even if one is required by contract. Finally, DCMA guidelines do not recommend the use of a schedule basis document or a schedule narrative.

Given DCMA’s focus on ensuring the validity of schedules in an earned value management environment, in some cases DCMA procedures and measures go beyond best practices described in the Schedule Assessment Guide. These DCMA measures focus on ensuring that control account budgets are valid, cost and schedule estimates are fully integrated, earned value techniques are validated, and the like.

  1. We referenced the following instructions and guidelines: Earned Value Management System Compliance Reviews Instruction (DCMA-INST 208); Overview: 14 Point Assessment (EVC-104_Rev 1); IMS assessment guides (EVC-101_Rev11, EVC-102_Rev8, and EVC-103_Rev7); Schedule Margin Position Paper (EVC-106_Rev2); and Finding the Critical Path (EVC-100_Rev1).↩︎