Schedule quality, forensic delay analysis and quantitative risk — explained by practitioners, with the charts to prove it. No fluff, no vendor-speak: the same standards and methods we built into the product, written up properly.
It has become the de facto quality standard for CPM schedules far beyond US defence contracting — and it is routinely misunderstood. Every metric, every threshold, where the 44-day limits actually come from, and which failures matter most: the reference guide we wish someone had handed us years ago.
Five honest routes compared — desktop viewers, trials, MS Project import, Excel and browser tools — plus the confidentiality question nobody asks before uploading a live commercial programme to a stranger's server.
P6 has two definitions of "critical" and on any constrained or multi-calendar programme they disagree. Which setting to use, when float can't be trusted, and why every delay report should say which one it means.
The seven things to find before reading any bars, the five questions that instantly raise the meeting's IQ, and the "90% complete" confession hiding in the remaining-duration column.
The Accepted Programme is the keystone of the contract — and the four rejection reasons are mostly quality failures in disguise. Clause 31.2 as a self-audit checklist, float ownership, and the deemed-acceptance trap.
A seven-section skeleton with a copy-paste template, the basis document vs the narrative, and why the report that admits the slip reads as competence — while the one that hides it becomes evidence of concealment.
The companion document that records how the schedule was built — assumptions, durations, logic, constraints and exclusions. AACE 38R-06 walked through section by section, and why a contemporaneous basis is the strongest answer to "this baseline was never realistic".
A high-quality schedule can still be wrong — but a low-quality one can't even be wrong honestly. Why structural integrity, not optimism, is what tribunals and boards end up trusting.
Open ends, lag abuse, constraint pinning, six-month activities and the unstatused baseline — what each one looks like in P6, why good planners commit them anyway, and how to fix them.
The four relationship types and when each is legitimate, why leads break the maths, the lag-calendar trap almost nobody knows about, and what your relationships-per-activity ratio is really telling you.
Total vs free float, what negative float actually says about your committed dates, and the oldest fight in construction: who owns it. With the forward-and-backward-pass refresher you'll actually remember.
The baseline is the contract's memory. When to re-baseline (rarely, formally) versus how it actually happens (quietly, to hide slip) — and why contemporaneous updates are gold when the dispute arrives.
SPI converges to 1.0 on every project, however late it finishes. How earned schedule restates performance in units of time — ES, SV(t), SPI(t) and the TSPI test that calls out fictional recovery plans.
The AACE 29R-03 family tree and the SCL Protocol's six methods, mapped onto each other in plain language — and the records test that quietly eliminates most of your options.
Tribunals like it because it's transparent; opponents attack it because it can't isolate causation. When MIP 3.1 is the right call, how to build a defensible as-built, and why total-time claims keep failing.
Two names everyone reaches for, frequently interchangeably and wrongly. One is prospective, one retrospective — and using the wrong one hands your opponent their cross-examination script.
The employer's best defence and the contractor's biggest fear. What true concurrency actually requires, why it's rarer than claimed, and how your choice of analysis method changes the answer.
Why your deterministic finish date usually sits at P10–P30, what merge bias does at every path convergence, and how to read P50, P80, criticality and tornado charts like they matter — because they do.
Ranges from evidence rather than optimism, the too-narrow-range disease, why correlation can't be skipped, and the six steps that make a QSRA output worth believing.
Drop a P6 XER or MS Project file in your browser — full DCMA 14-point check, analytics and risk in seconds. Nothing is uploaded.