A project manager’s questions are rarely about a dispute. They are about what happened, so that the next meeting goes better than the last one.
“Why was the first-floor ductwork late?” CDIA gathers the RFI emails, the minutes, the delay notice and the progress reports, shows you the evidence in the Investigation Review, and on Continue gives you a cited account of what those records say: on the example project, the contractor’s claim records the coordinated drawings as issued fourteen days after the date RFI 031 required, the RFI email records the programmed start the subcontractor could not make, and the instruction relocating the air handling unit changed the coordination drawings. One citation is an Outlook email; click it and the message opens with its sender, recipients and date. Forward-looking wording such as “will be issued next week” is not treated as evidence that something happened; CDIA’s Strict Planned vs Actual classification is on by default.
“What happened with access to the east car park, and what effect did it have?” Access questions live in site diaries, in emails and in minutes, often with different accounts. On the example project the answer runs from the Council’s email restricting deliveries on school days, through the progress report recording the working days lost at roof level, to the date the restriction was reviewed, each cited. Where two documents conflict, CDIA states both accounts and identifies the conflict rather than picking one.
A what-happened question produces an account with dates and citations where the records give them, and CDIA does not invent causation between the events it lists. If the records do not answer the question, CDIA says so.
Now open Chronology Builder. Enter the topic, for example “first-floor ductwork”, click Search, and CDIA assembles dated, cited items from the records. Add a filter for a reference or a date range. Expand any item to read the context around it. Tick the items you want and either export the chronology to Word or add them to the investigation set for a closed Evidence Q&A over just those items.
Two practical points. Add documents as you go: File > Add Documents and File > Prepare Project bring new material into the same prepared project, and duplicates are recognised and skipped. And Outlook .msg files import directly, so the email trail can be in the project rather than in five people’s inboxes.
CDIA is not planning software and does not calculate critical paths. It tells you, with a source reference, what the record says about the ductwork.
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