With any team, you need to know that you can depend on the members. You cannot lose players mid-season and maintain your strength or advantage over others. The team members, the coach, the trainers, the staff, and the owners, all need to be committed to the success of the team. If they are not, then you will all quickly understand the importance of teamwork!
The proposal team also needs to be committed to perform their roles and put in the extra effort to ensure they win government contracts. Make certain that your color team reviewers understand their commitment to the proposal process. Do not leave the selection of the review team(s) participants to the last minute. Prepare for this in the pre-season (RFP or Capture Phase). This is one of the times that your Company Executives can directly influence the proposal outcome – early in the process!
When your BD Leadership team interacts with teammate senior corporate managers, it helps to ensure that expectations are understood and met. Insist that teammates fully support the proposal process, including the review process. It is not enough to simply provide a warm body for an afternoon or a day. Color Team Reviewers do not just ‘show up’ for review and provide the kind of insight that is needed to submit winning bids.
Reviewers must be available to complete the entire review, based on the proposal schedule, not their own personal schedule. They must dedicate time before the review to become familiar with the RFP and capture strategies – which are locked at this point. They must be ready to give a thorough, honest, and constructive assessment of the draft documents. Reviewers must be willing to take their instructions and directions from the Proposal Manager. If they cannot do this, then you do not need them on your review team.
The Proposal Manager determines review format and can leverage Microsoft 365 co-authoring and collaboration features in Word. To ensure a smooth review and incorporate suggestions into writer packages, do not allow any reviewer to ‘print a hardcopy and review it at the lake this weekend.’ This will only result in frustration because their comments will be turned in after all other reviewers’ comments have already been incorporated.
You will save hours and hours of time – and maybe NOT have to work all weekend – if you require online reviews. Comments will be consolidated in one document and attributed to the correct reviewer. Additionally, reviewers will have time to disposition conflicting comments BEFORE the draft goes back to the Proposal Manager. This is one proposal automation that really saves time - usually between Friday and Monday!
Here is an overview of three common color team reviews and their functions. If your company does not use the terminology ‘color team reviews’, then you may be using Strategy Review, Draft Review, etc. The name of the review does not matter. The purpose and outcome are the important factors.
Blue Team occurs during qualification phase and assesses company qualifications and resources. Capture Managers create capture plans that develop and refine win strategies and develop win themes. Some companies conduct strategy workshops to develop win strategies and then conduct independent reviews of those strategies. Other companies conduct Blue Team as an interactive strategy session and develop strategies in real-time. Blue Team reviewers have knowledge of the customer, the solicitation, company capabilities, and past performance, as well as the technical knowledge to provide a plan to move forward in the bid process.
Capture Managers usually review Blue Team outputs to the corporate management team to gain approval of capture strategies, company investment, and strategic alignment. After approval, the bid strategies are locked, and future review teams cannot change them.
Pink Team evaluates the proposal outline to the RFP requirements and validates mapping of Blue Team-approved strategies to the outline. They will also evaluate the effectiveness and placement of proposal win themes. After Pink Team, the outline is now validated and locked.
The Red Team Review is conducted usually between ½ and ¾ way through the proposal timeline, after the Final RFP is released, and depends on the maturity of proposal drafts.
This is the 8th in a 12-part series Get More from 24 Hours. This series is based on the eBook Get More From 24 Hours in a Day and Win More Government Contracts, which contains the entire series with additional bonus content and tutorials. The eBook is evolved from a presentation at APMP's International Bid & Proposal Con 2021, given by OneTeam's Product Manager, Donna Hamby. Download your free copy of the eBook.
OneTeam is a complete, secure, cloud-based collaboration platform for GovCons to track, qualify, capture, propose and win more contracts with fewer resources by streamlining and automating processes. OneTeam was designed and developed by a federal government contractor to address the lack of resources and time, as well as the pain associated with winning government contracts.