SL-DEMO

The schedule health assessment identifies a critical condition driven by eighty activities exhibiting negative float, indicating that the current logic and durations do not support the planned completion date. This structural deficit undermines confidence in the projected finish dates, as the schedule reports that key milestones, including Practical Completion, are currently unachievable without recovery action. The presence of widespread negative float suggests that the critical path is unstable and that the reported dates may not reflect the true earliest possible completion. The reader should review the float analysis section to examine the specific activities contributing to this negative float and assess the impact on the critical path.

The Building Envelope and Superstructure packages present the most significant schedule risks, driven primarily by activities with negative float and a high concentration of near-critical tasks. These areas exhibit the strongest signals of delay potential, with the Building Envelope showing a particularly dense cluster of near-critical activities alongside its critical findings. Reviewers should prioritize these packages to assess the immediate impact on the project completion date.

The contractual and progress dates the project is managed against — Practical Completion, sectional handovers, commissioning — auto-detected and ranked critical-first, lowest float first.

Reading this chart. Two cumulative curves over time: where the schedule should be (Planned Value, solid blue) and where it actually is (Earned Value, solid red). The vertical dotted line is the data date; the gap between the two curves at that line is the current schedule performance.

Acronyms. PV = Planned Value — the share of total scheduled work that this schedule's own planned dates put before a given date. It is not your approved baseline, which this file does not carry. EV = Earned Value — the share actually completed, computed as Σ(original_duration × percent_complete) ÷ Σ(original_duration). SV = Schedule Variance = EV − PV, expressed in working-day equivalents under the duration-weighting. SPI = Schedule Performance Index = EV ÷ PV, here against the schedule's own planned dates. SPI < 1.00 ⇒ behind those dates; SPI > 1.00 ⇒ ahead. Performance against an approved baseline needs the baseline itself (the completion forecast panel says how).

Why duration-weighted. P6 / MS Project exports routinely strip resource and cost data, so a cost-weighted EV (the classic EVM formulation from AACE RP 27R-03) is not always available. Duration-weighting is the industry-standard fallback: each activity contributes in proportion to its original working-day duration rather than its budget. Full formula and caveats in METHODOLOGY §5d.

A forecast needs your baseline programme. Earned Schedule (PMI Standard for EVM, 2019) measures progress against the plan you agreed; run a comparison with your baseline, or track this project, to see it. The programme's own finish is 2028-06-29.

What this section answers: where else forward risk is concentrated besides the controlling chain. Each row is an alternative chain to the project endpoint that's within 20 working days of the critical path; any of them could become controlling with a small slip.

Eight float paths are identified within twenty working days of the controlling path, indicating a significant concentration of near-critical risk. The data suggests the cluster is dominated by near-critical chains above zero, as only one of the top three paths currently exhibits zero float. Multiple sub-critical paths matter because any of them could become controlling with a small slip, thereby constraining the project's forward progress.

Top 3 of 9 paths shown (the primary driving path plus 8 near-critical) — the full 5-path table and the float-path overlay chart are in the Narrative layer.

DCMA 14-Point Assessment: 7 pass, 4 fail, 3 not assessed.

The full 14-item scorecard (every measured value, passing items included) is in the Narrative layer; per-check offender lists are in the appendix and the Excel workbook's DCMA detail sheet.

The full set of near-critical chains behind the Brief-layer float-path callout, with the overlay chart showing when each chain lands on the calendar. The Excel appendix carries the complete per-activity list per path.

DCMA 14-Point Assessment: 7 pass, 4 fail, 3 not assessed.

Float analysis measures how much delay each activity can absorb before it pushes the project finish. Activities with zero or near-zero float drive the completion date.

Chart colour key (DCMA §6/§7 bands):

• Red — activities at immediate risk (negative or zero total float)
• Orange — activities with 1–10 working days of float (DCMA's near-critical band)
• Blue — activities with comfortable float margins
• Grey — excessively high float (over 44 working days), usually signalling missing logic

Note: the cover-page Near-critical activities headline counts activities within the schedule's status cycle rather than the strict 1–10 wd band, so it can include activities that fall in the orange and blue regions of the chart. See METHODOLOGY §5c.2.

Concrete next actions derived from this analysis. Every recommendation below references a specific number, finding, or warning elsewhere in the report — nothing speculative.

Industry precedent (AACE RP 29R-03 §4.3; CIOB Guide §5.5) treats this section as a required deliverable element of any forensic report.

• Close the open ends: 1 missing predecessor(s) — see the Open ends section for the affected-activity list. Every incomplete activity should have at least one predecessor and one successor so the critical path is fully driven by logic. (DCMA §1 (Logic) counts a larger population: activities missing a predecessor or a successor.)
• Address the negative-float population (DCMA §7). The schedule is admitting it cannot deliver its planned dates from current logic and progress; a recovery plan, re-baseline, or formal acknowledgement of the slip is required before the reported dates can be relied on for contract correspondence.
• Schedule Performance Index is 0.90 against the schedule's own planned dates — trending behind them. Review critical-path remaining work and cause-of-delay records; trigger corrective actions before the slip becomes unrecoverable.

The analysis engine identified twenty findings across the schedule model, comprising one critical item, eight warnings, and eleven informational observations. The critical finding relates to eighty activities displaying negative float, a condition that indicates the network logic cannot currently achieve the planned completion dates. This aligns with the DCMA 14-Point Assessment §4.7 guidance, which states that negative float means the schedule's logic cannot achieve the contractual completion date and that ideally there should not be any negative float in the schedule. Several warning-level findings further support this conclusion, noting that key milestones including Substructure complete and Practical Completion are projected to finish fourteen to fifteen working days late. The Critical Path Length Index of 0.95 sits at the threshold defined by DCMA 14-Point Assessment §3.1.2.3, where a value less than 0.95 requires further investigation into the recovery rate required. Reviewers are advised to examine the critical finding regarding negative float and the associated milestone delays to determine the validity of the current schedule logic.

Logic quality checks assess whether the network is fully driven by sequential dependencies. Gaps, excessive non-FS links, and dangling chains all undermine the critical path calculation.

Activities with missing logic — either no predecessor (nothing must happen before them) or no successor (nothing depends on their completion).

DCMA 14-Point §1 expects fewer than 5% of incomplete activities to have open logic.

• Missing predecessors allow an activity to start on the project start date regardless of its true sequencing.
• Missing successors mean delay to the activity never flows through to the completion date.

Review each row and confirm with the planner whether the logic gap is intentional.

Scheduling options read from the source file. These govern how the source scheduling tool calculated float and the critical path.

Two options in particular (Progress Override and the 'Include all activities meeting CP definition' flag) can change the reported critical path materially without changing a single activity or relationship.

Any setting that warrants a warning is listed separately in the Findings table above.

The activities and relationships behind each failing DCMA item, most severe first. Tables are capped at 20 rows; the Excel appendix's “DCMA detail” sheet carries the full lists.

The accompanying .xlsx workbook is the audit companion to this PDF. Wherever the PDF says full list in Excel appendix, the matching tab below carries the unabridged data.

The workbook is laid out in two tiers. The first tier (presentation tabs) gives audit-ready tables of milestones, the critical path, ranked float paths, and the full activity register. The second tier (findings-register tabs) drills into each individual finding with affected activities — one tab per finding.

This report assesses the uploaded schedule against the published industry standards listed below. Each finding traces to a specific rule in one or more of those standards. The analysis is automated and deterministic — the same schedule file will always produce the same findings.

Scope of this analysis. This report is based solely on the schedule file you uploaded. Two conventions govern how its figures were derived, and both matter when reconciling them against the source tool:

• Date basis. Every start and finish date in this report is each schedule's *current forecast* — the date work is now expected to occur, or its recorded actual date where the work is complete. In Primavera P6 that is the Remaining Early date; in Microsoft Project and Asta Powerproject it is the scheduled Start/Finish. The report does not use a tool's frozen Planned/target dates, which stop updating once an activity is in progress and so understate movement on a progressed schedule. Baseline dates stored inside a file (e.g. a P6 baseline) are read as recorded, and every variance compares the current forecast on each side.
• Float and criticality — the source tool's — every total-float and critical-path figure in this report (including the DCMA float checks, float paths, near-critical detection and milestone deliverability) is the value recorded by the scheduling tool that produced the file. ScheduleLens does not overwrite it. Where the source recorded no float and the activity is incomplete, ScheduleLens's own calendar-aware pass supplies one; completed activities are left unfloated rather than given an invented value. That gap-filling pass applies Retained Logic/Progress Override per the file's scheduling options but does not model Start/Finish-No-Later-Than or As-Late-As-Possible constraints, Expected Finish forcing, or an imposed must-finish date. ScheduleLens's own critical-path pass is used for change between two schedules — critical-path churn, bounded what-if, retained-logic versus progress-override, between-snapshot slip — where both sides run through the same engine; those figures are labelled as ScheduleLens's. Where the independent pass disagrees with the file's own critical flags, the disagreement is reported by the critical-path staleness check rather than resolved.

Units. Day figures in this report are calendar days unless they are marked as working days. Two different quantities are being measured and the distinction is deliberate.

Movement between two dates — how far completion, a milestone or the schedule end has moved between submissions — is reported in calendar days. Elapsed time is the same quantity for every activity on a programme, so figures measured this way can be compared with each other, and they do not change when a calendar's holidays are edited. AACE RP 29R-03 directs that as-built comparison be carried out in calendar days for this reason, and cautions that float expressed in workday units differs between activities on different calendars; SCL Protocol §8.8 gives the same caution where multiple work-day calendars are in use.

Schedule properties — float, activity durations, the delay quantum recorded against each event, and the DCMA thresholds — are reported in working days, and are marked as such wherever they appear. These are not spans between two dates and have no calendar-day equivalent: an activity whose duration grows from 10 to 20 working days has no single elapsed-day value, because that depends on where in the calendar the work falls. The DCMA 14-point checks define their thresholds in working days, so restating them would change what is being tested.

A working-day figure is counted on the calendar assigned to the activity it describes, not on the project default — on a programme running five-day and seven-day calendars together, the same elapsed period is a different number of working days for different activities.

Use of AI. The ScheduleLens analysis engine computed every finding, figure, score and chart in this report. At the requester's election, a language model (qwen3-6-27b, via Venice) then wrote the explanatory prose in the sections “Executive Summary”, “Where to focus first”, “Float-path risk” and “Findings”. It worked only from those computed results. It did not see the schedule file and did no analysis of its own. Where prose and a table or chart differ, the table or chart governs.

ScheduleLens is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or certified by AACE International, the Project Management Institute, the Defense Contract Management Agency, the Chartered Institute of Building, the Society of Construction Law, or the Government Accountability Office. Citations to these standards in this report are bibliographic, indicating the analytical basis for each check.

Each abbreviation used in the Reference column of the findings table maps to the full title below.

These are bibliographic citations indicating the analytical basis for each check. ScheduleLens is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or certified by AACE International, PMI, DCMA, CIOB, or the Society of Construction Law.