About 45 minutes to set up · claude.ai only

Get your method out of your head and written down

Today

You are the only person who can run the diagnostic properly, so every engagement routes back through you. A senior hire watches you do it twice and still asks what happens next, because the real method is a set of judgment calls you have never said out loud.

With Claude

You talk it through once in one messy paragraph, hand over the past deliverables, and get a staged playbook that names the judgment calls, the signals behind each one, and the questions you ask at every stage. It goes in the project knowledge and the next engagement starts from it.

The prompt

Paste this into claude.ai and replace anything in brackets.

You are helping me document how my firm actually does a piece of work, so that someone other than me can run it.

The method I want captured: [name it, for example our operations diagnostic, or our vendor selection process]
Everything I have that shows how it goes: [paste past deliverables, working files, checklists, or emails, or write SEE PROJECT KNOWLEDGE]
How I would explain it out loud to a new hire: [talk it through in one messy paragraph, do not clean it up]
Who will run it next: [their role and experience level]
Where it has gone wrong before: [paste whatever you remember, or write NONE]

Produce a playbook with these parts:
1. What this method is for, and the two or three situations where it is the wrong choice.
2. The stages, in order. For each stage: the inputs needed, what the person actually does, the artifact it produces, and how they know the stage is finished.
3. The judgment calls, which is the part that matters most here. For every decision I appear to make on instinct, write the question being answered, the options, and the signals that point to each option. Where my material does not explain a call I clearly make, ask me about it instead of guessing.
4. The questions we ask clients at each stage, in the words we actually use.
5. The failure modes, drawn from what I told you plus what the stages themselves suggest, each with its early warning sign.
6. A one page checklist the next person can keep open while running the method.

When the draft is done, list every place where you had to guess at my reasoning, and ask me the smallest set of questions that would close those gaps.

What to skip in consulting and professional services firms

  • Anything your MSA, NDA, or client data policy does not clearly allow. Professional services contracts routinely restrict where client material can go, and many now carry specific AI or subprocessor language, so read the agreement and get written approval before you paste a client's documents anywhere. Know what your plan does too: on Free, Pro, and Max accounts your chats are used to improve Anthropic's models only if you turn that on in Privacy Settings, and Incognito chats are never used for it, while Team and Enterprise sit under the Commercial Terms, where inputs and outputs are not used for model training by default. When in doubt, work from anonymized material and keep the client's name out of it.
  • Any finding, benchmark, or figure in a client deliverable that Claude produced rather than you. No industry averages, no market sizes, no comparison companies, no percentages it filled in because the sentence wanted one. Paste your own analysis and let Claude write the argument around your numbers. A single invented benchmark that a client's team can disprove ends the engagement and the referral behind it.
  • Anything that requires seeing your systems. In the browser Claude cannot open your project tool, time tracker, billing, or the client's data room, so it cannot tell you where a project stands, whether you are over on hours, or what changed in an account this week. It knows only what you put in the chat or the project knowledge, and it does not know what happened after its training data ends unless you paste it in or have it search the web.

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Every prompt on this page plus the rest, so you still have them on Monday. One email, then four short ones on making it stick. Unsubscribe any time.

Or answer four questions and Claude writes three workflows for your specific business rather than the industry generally.

Before you try it

More for consulting and professional services firms

Full guide for consulting and professional services firms