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Scope the work before it becomes an argument

Today

The client says yes in principle, so the scope of work is now due. You copy the last one, change the names, and leave the assumptions thin because tightening them means a harder conversation this week. Month two is when you find out what that cost.

With Claude

You paste the findings and your staffing model and get phases with defensible hour ranges, an assumptions section that names who owns what, a blunt out of scope list, and the change order triggers written down before either side needs them.

The prompt

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

You are helping me turn an agreed set of findings into a scope of work I can send to a client.

The findings or discovery memo: [paste it here]
What the client said they want as an outcome: [paste their own words if you have them]
How we staff and price work: [paste your roles, rates or blended rate, and typical engagement shapes, or write SEE PROJECT KNOWLEDGE]
Two or three scopes of work we have signed before: [paste them, or write SEE PROJECT KNOWLEDGE]
Hard constraints: [budget ceiling, deadline, client team availability, anything the client has already ruled out]

Do this in order:
1. State the outcome this engagement is being bought for, in one sentence, from the client's point of view. If the findings support more than one plausible outcome, list them, recommend which to scope against, and say why.
2. Break the work into phases. For each phase give the deliverables by name, the client decision that closes the phase, the roles involved, and an hour range you can defend. Where you are guessing at effort, label that line ASSUMPTION.
3. Write the assumptions section. Every hour range above that depends on something the client must provide belongs here, named specifically, with who provides it and by when.
4. Write the out of scope section. Be blunt and concrete. Include the three things a client in this situation most often assumes is included.
5. List the change order triggers: the specific events that would make this scope wrong, and what happens when one of them occurs.
6. Write acceptance criteria for each deliverable, one sentence each, phrased so the client and I can both tell whether it was met.
7. Flag anything in my staffing or rate information that does not line up with the phases you built.

Write it in plain language a non-technical buyer can read in ten minutes. Do not invent a price. Give me the hour ranges and I will apply our rates myself.

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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Before you try it

More for consulting and professional services firms

Full guide for consulting and professional services firms