Forensic Delay Analysis (FDA) can be defined as “the study of event interaction using the critical path method of scheduling to understand the significance of deviations from a baseline for potential use in legal proceedings”. More simply put, FDA is about examining what actually happened on a project, how it differed from the original plan, whose fault it was, what effect it had, and ultimately being able to use this information to back up or contest a claim in court.

Forensic delay analysis, like many other technical fields, is both a science and an art. As such, it relies upon professional judgment and expert opinion and usually requires many subjective decisions. One of the most important of these decisions is what technical approach should be used to measure or quantify delay and identify the affected activities in order to focus on causation (cause and effect). Equally important is how the analyst should apply the chosen method. Professional judgment and expert opinion ultimately rest on subjectivity, but that subjectivity must be based on diligent factual research and objective analysis of the results.

In this course, you will be introduced to many topics that will prepare you to understand forensic delay analysis. A prerequisite to FDA is a thorough understanding of the critical path method of scheduling, so that you can fully understand the impact of schedule deviations. Therefore, we start with a review of CPM, and a discussion of the importance of developing a quality baseline schedule.

We will then examine what constitutes a deviation from the plan, and how we can record progress and identify delays on an updated schedule. This will lead into an in-depth discussion of the various methods of delay analysis, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages. Some general guidelines will be given for choosing the appropriate method for different situations. However, it will ultimately be a decision for your team and you as to which method to use for any particular schedule, based on the evidence to hand and the expertise available to you.

Finally, we will introduce common types of contracts, and discuss contractual requirements with regard to schedule delays and give some presentation of current construction law protocols

It is important to recognize that no forensic delay analysis method is exact. The level of accuracy of the answers produced by each method is a function of the quality of the data used therein, the accuracy of the assumptions, and the subjective judgments made by the forensic schedule analyst. But regardless of method there is one common theme throughout all and that is the importance of a quality schedule and the availability of verifiable records to backup your position.