In one line: A pursuit is reviewed in stages, each with its own color and its own question, so that problems are caught when they are cheap to fix rather than the night before submission.
Core idea
Proposal teams are too close to their own work to judge it the way a customer will. Color team reviews bring in fresh reviewers at set points in the capture and proposal process. Each review has one specific purpose. The colors are a convention, and organizations name them slightly differently, but the sequence is widely shared.
How it works
| Team | When | The question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Purple | before committing to pursue | How likely are we to win, and does this fit our goals? |
| Blue (first) | early capture | Is the capture strategy and plan sound? |
| Black hat | capture | What will each competitor propose, and how do we beat it? |
| Blue (second) | late capture | Does the updated plan and solution hold up? |
| Pink | storyboards and mock-ups | Is the solution right, and is the proposal strategy on track? |
| Green | cost volume | Is the cost and price sound and competitive? |
| Red | full draft, including price | How would the customer score this proposal? |
| Gold | final | Do executives approve the proposal and price for release? |
| White | after the award decision | What did we learn, from capture to contract? |
The red team is the centerpiece. Reviewers score the draft against the solicitation’s evaluation criteria, as the customer’s panel would, and the writers get several days to act on the findings.
What makes reviews work:
- Hold an orientation, appoint a review leader, and state the review’s goals explicitly.
- Run the right review at the right time. A red team on a storyboard, or a pink team on a finished draft, wastes everyone’s effort.
- Brief reviewers on the solicitation and the criteria, and give them enough time.
- Set the right attitude: reviewers look for problems, and authors receive findings as help, not as criticism.
In practice
The same idea works outside proposals. A design review series is a color team process for hardware. A “pink team” on the storyboard of a major presentation or report catches structural problems before anyone polishes slides. A white team habit, a short written lessons-learned after every bid or project, is the cheapest one to adopt and the one most often skipped.
Questions to ask yourself
- At what stage do our reviews usually find the big problems, and is that too late?
- Do our reviewers score against the customer’s criteria, or against their own preferences?
- When did we last hold a lessons-learned review after losing?
Connections
- What they review: Proposals and White Papers, within New Business Development. The price behind the green team: Cost-Based Bidding.
- The engineering equivalent: gate reviews in the Product Development Process.
- Why candid reviews need trust: Psychological Safety.
- Capabilities exercised: Inquiry, Communicating and Advocacy, Responsibility and Urgency to Deliver.
Sources
- Course materials on color teams and the proposal review process; no public source.