Cowork Instructions and Projects

The three layered places where Cowork stores firm rules, your personal preferences, and project-specific context. Plus how to start a Project. About half an hour.

DemoTBC, week of May 18

What we cover

The three-layer model: Organization instructions (admin, firm-wide), Global instructions (per-user), Project instructions (per-Project).
What goes in each layer: firm conventions go up, role preferences go middle, engagement context goes per-Project.
How to start a Project for a specific portco or deal, with right-panel instructions and connected MCP sources.
Project memory: what Cowork auto-accumulates locally on your machine, and what NOT to put there (it is not firm-shared and not centrally backed up).
How this compares to Claude Code's CLAUDE.md if you are coming from the CLI surface -- on Cowork the same job is done by the three instruction layers above.

Why it matters

Without these layers in place, every Cowork conversation starts from zero. With them, the firm's rules set the baseline, your personal preferences ride on top, and each project has its own context. Three layers, three scopes -- and Project memory stays local to you, which means deal-critical knowledge needs to live in writing somewhere else.

Hands-on moment

Open Cowork Settings > Cowork > Global instructions and write your personal layer. Then start a Project for one of your active workstreams and write its instructions in the right panel.

Peer moment (3 min)

“Trade Global instructions snippets with a neighbor. Borrow one rule from theirs that you had not thought to add.”

Agenda

Organization instructions (firm-wide)

The top layer. Firm rules every analyst inherits. Protis owns these on GGP's behalf and publishes them through the usual firm channels. Typical content covers naming conventions, CRM field standards, no-go data categories, voice and tone, and compliance-driven restrictions. Only Admins and above can view or edit Organization instructions. The field caps at 3,000 characters, organization instructions take precedence if user instructions conflict, and changes may take up to one hour to apply. Details that apply to one role or one engagement belong in the lower layers.

Room prompt

Picture what your firm's Organization instructions should contain. Write one rule you'd want firm-wide and one rule that should stay personal. That's the test for what belongs at the top layer versus the middle.

Global instructions (per-user)

Your personal layer above the firm baseline. Lives in Settings > Cowork > Global instructions on your desktop app. Five-line template: your role, your decision style, your communication preference, your no-go list, and the recent context that always seems relevant. Updates apply to every new conversation you start. Stays personal; not shared with the firm.

Room prompt

Open Cowork Settings > Cowork > Global instructions. Write the 5-line snippet for yourself. Save it. Ask Cowork your last work question and note one thing that changed in the answer.

Project instructions (per-Project)

The conversation-scoped layer for one engagement, one portco, one workstream. Starting a Project gives you a right panel where you write 3 to 5 sentences of context: what the work is, who the audience is, what the constraints are. Project instructions add Project-specific context inside that Project. Project memory stays local to your machine; do not treat it as firm knowledge. One up-front note: Cowork Projects are desktop-local, not cloud synced today, and not shareable across Team or Enterprise today. Two workarounds in the meantime: the classic claude.ai browser Projects, a separate surface from Cowork, do support permissioned shared visibility, and shared workflows can ship as Plugins through the firm's private marketplace. The Module 2 lab walks the plugin path live.

Room prompt

Start a new Project named after a real portco or deal. In the right panel, write 3 sentences: what the portco does, what stage they are at, what you are working on with them this quarter. Save the Project and ask one question scoped to it.