GAO Schedule Assessment Guide

Published in December 2015, the guide develops the scheduling material in GAO’s cost guide into a standalone method. Its position is that the schedule is not a reporting artefact but the programme’s operating model: a network of all the work, logically sequenced and resourced, capable of showing how a change anywhere moves the finish date.

The 10 practices cover capturing all activities, sequencing them, assigning resources, establishing durations, verifying traceability, confirming the critical path, ensuring reasonable float, conducting a schedule risk analysis, updating with actual progress, and maintaining a baseline. GAO applies them as audit criteria on US federal programmes, which is what makes the guide useful far outside the United States: it is a published, checkable definition of what a schedule that can be relied on looks like.

Its preface also binds schedule to cost rather than leaving them as separate disciplines: a cost estimate cannot be considered credible if it does not account for the cost effects of schedule slippage.