Thirteen Standing Prompts Keep the Chief of Staff Auditing the Project

These prompts are starting points. The Chief of Staff should adapt them to the project’s actual repositories, tools, risks, and decision rights. “The Playbook Has to Fit in Human Memory” gives the situational index into these prompts, in “Setting It Up Takes an Afternoon and Five Commands.” Each prompt below is ready to paste.

Project state audit#

Reconstruct current project state from specifications, decisions, issues, recent
code changes, tests, acceptance evidence, meeting records, and commitments. Identify
material contradictions, missing owners, stale assumptions, unsupported work,
overdue checkpoints, and decisions requiring human judgment. Return only findings
that could change what someone does next.

Question-to-requirement audit#

Search recent conversations and meeting records for questions, suggestions,
exploratory ideas, or customer requests that later appear as requirements, roadmap
commitments, issues, or implementation work. Show the semantic transition and
whether an explicit human decision authorized it.

Scope drift audit#

Compare current implementation and active work with the latest approved
specification. Identify additions, omissions, changed assumptions, or acceptance
criteria that do not match. Distinguish implementation drift from likely stale
specification. Escalate rather than silently correcting intent.

Customer chase audit#

List customer or stakeholder commitments whose promised update or checkpoint is
approaching or overdue. Identify whether the team has already prepared the evidence
needed for a proactive update. Draft concise updates for human review.

Product evidence audit#

Review current product claims and roadmap assumptions. For each consequential claim,
identify supporting evidence, contradictory evidence, recency, source, and what
observation would most weaken the claim. Distinguish repeated anecdote from broader
evidence.

Experiment audit#

List active experiments. For each, state the hypothesis, evidence being collected,
stopping condition, current result, and decision the result is supposed to change.
Flag experiments that cannot change a decision or that have continued after their
stopping condition.

Weekly review#

Compare last week’s approved outcomes and learning goals with actual results. Show
completed and missed commitments, evidence learned, acceptance status, drift,
blocked work, unresolved decisions, and proposed next-week outcomes. Recommend work
to stop.

Meeting preparation#

Prepare this meeting by showing what changed since the previous checkpoint, prior
commitments, completed and incomplete actions, current evidence, changed
assumptions, unresolved questions, scope changes, and the decisions humans need to
make. Do not include routine status that participants can read themselves.

Meeting classification#

Classify the conversation into decisions, questions, observations, hypotheses, ideas
not approved, action items, owners, acceptance criteria, specification changes, and
next checkpoint. Flag ambiguous statements and any place where a weaker category
appears to be treated as a stronger one.

Work authorization gate#

Before beginning substantial work, trace the requested work to current
specification, explicit decision, approved experiment, defect, regulatory
requirement, or operational necessity. If no valid trace exists, do not invent one.
Explain the smallest clarification required.

Acceptance audit#

Compare delivered behavior with current specification and acceptance criteria. For
each criterion, show the evidence. Identify unspecified behavior, missing evidence,
unresolved exceptions, and any human acceptance still required.

Management garbage collection#

Inventory recurring reports, meetings, dashboards, forms, approvals, and manually
maintained artifacts. For each, identify the failure it prevents, evidence it is
used, duplicate sources, human maintenance cost, and a proposed stop condition. Rank
candidates for removal.

Portfolio compression#

Read subordinate project and product reviews. Identify only cross-project
implications: conflicts, shared dependencies, duplicated work, repeated failures,
common customer signals, resource contention, reusable capabilities, experiments to
stop, and decisions requiring executive or capital-allocation attention.