Stop 2 of 8 · Weekly
The threat and risk assessment
Turn two hours of labelled walkthrough notes and a page of open source reading into an assessment in your structure, with the scoring left where it belongs.
What a walkthrough actually produces
Curtis leaves a site with four pages of shorthand and a head full of things he noticed but did not write down. Historically the assessment took two evenings: one to type the notes up, one to argue them into his structure. The typing evening is the one worth handing over.
The notes go in already labelled. Site 1 is the residence, Site 2 is the office, Route A is the usual run between them. Approach, perimeter, access control, lighting, cameras, alarms, staff, the neighbours, the routine. What comes back is not an assessment yet. It is your own observations sorted, deduplicated and grouped, plus a list of the things a reader will ask that you did not record.
The structure holds, the content is yours
Every assessment Curtis writes runs the same order: scope and method, the environment, the threat picture, observed vulnerabilities, risk rating, recommendations by priority, and the annex he keeps offline. Claude is good at holding that structure over twenty pages when you are tired. It is not good at deciding that a client with a public profile and a recent legal dispute faces a different threat picture than one who simply has money.
Split the work that way and the division is clean.
| Claude does | Curtis does |
|---|---|
| Sorts observations into findings, keeps the structure, drafts the language | Decides the threat actors, the likelihood and the impact |
| Lists what is missing and what it cannot see | Goes back to the site or the client for it |
| Rewrites a finding as an action with an owner | Decides whether the client will actually pay for it |
Try this
Below are my raw notes from a site walk, already written with labels. Sort them into findings grouped under approach, perimeter, access control, lighting and surveillance, alarms and monitoring, staff and procedure, and routine. Merge duplicates. For each finding, state the observation in one sentence and the exposure it creates in one sentence, and leave the risk rating blank because I score it. Then list, separately, what a reader of the finished assessment would ask that my notes do not answer. [paste the labelled walkthrough notes]
Write the environment section of an assessment for a suburban area with the characteristics below. Cover the general crime picture, emergency service response expectations, road network resilience, natural hazards and any large public venues nearby. Use only what I have given you and what is generally true of areas of this type, and mark every sentence you could not source with the word Unverified so I can check it. Do not name the area back to me and do not try to identify it. [paste your notes on the area, with no place names]
Take each finding below and write the recommendation as one action, with the role that owns it, the rough effort in hours or days, and a one line answer to the question a client always asks: what happens if we do nothing. Rank them so the cheap ones that close real exposure sit at the top, not the expensive ones. [paste the findings table]