The Purpose and Goals of Color Team Reviews

Proposal color team reviews are an industry practice essential to improving the quality of the proposal. They’re done through a detailed logistical and disciplined process in order to ensure an appealing proposal response.

Although the review process isn’t about determining your business capabilities, they can contribute to identifying the gaps in the content of the proposal that lower the value of your response. Its core purpose is to help the writing team improve the quality of the proposal, and ensure a compliant product to increase the potential of winning.

Firms that provide proposal writing services need in-house reviewers to approach the proposal from different point of views. To secure better score evaluation, each stage must be assessed separately by different review teams.

Every type of review should assess the presence or absence of discriminators and win themes; evaluate if the proposal is compliant to the solicitation requirements, and make sure that it meets the needs of the federal agency that released the RFP. The reviews should be coinciding with each other; therefore it’s preferable a close collaboration between the teams ensure a compelling final product.

Depending on the company that is preparing the proposal, its complexity, the time required to assessing thoroughly every section, and other factors, there are certain types of review teams distinguished by colors that have different roles and purposes in the review process.

Main Color Team Reviews and Their Purposes

Pink Team

Pink Team Review team is set up immediately after the federal agency has released the request for proposal and is responsible to evaluate the draft proposal response. Its core goal is to discuss the critical solution approach, supporting win themes and discriminators.  They determine whether the proposal has accurate, balanced content consistent with the RFP and follows authorized storyboards.

The Pink team should determine that the proceedings and overall efforts are being properly led. The emphasis should be on the story accuracy, estimate whether customer’s needs are adequately addressed, and ensure the company’s performance goals are met.

Red Team

Red Team Review is the Final draft review, the last chance to improve your proposal prior to sending it to the evaluators. It’s about reading and scoring the responses to the proposal as if they are the customer. An experienced team should assemble to evaluate the entire proposal against the customer’s requirements and evaluation criteria.

They should ensure that the story is summarized effectively by reviewing every section of the proposal for compliance and well-presentation of the themes; documenting issues, problems and recommending for improvement solutions; ensuring that graphics, data, and tables are integrated; ensuring that the document is technically correct and communicates value; and finally identifying potential risks.

Gold Team

Gold Team Review focuses on contractual terms of the proposal, pricing, and scheduling. It involves thorough reading for quality and review consistency.

It requires senior management expertise to verify that previous reviews, especially red team reviews, are properly considered to avoid adverse conflicts. At this point, the proposal review should strive for excellence.

White Glove   

The White Glove team, also known as White Team,  comes right after the gold team. They’re responsible for a visual page-by-page review to confirm that there are no imperfections in format, graphics, or printing.

The main purpose is to ensure that constituent items are accurate and compliant with the solicitation.

Additional Color Team Reviews

Most of the companies have internally the review teams mentioned above. Every proposal writing firm strives to develop winning projects and staff the types of review teams that most efficiently meet their needs.  Depending on different factors additional review teams might be necessary.

Blue Team

Blue Team ensures that the outline of the proposal is on point. They review the primary capture strategy and the initial description of the solution, win themes and discriminators are well presented against the anticipated needs of the funding agency. Every section of the proposal should have an assigned writer; the outline must be complete and accurate. This team also determines if there are any information gaps if there are assigned the right subject matter experts and discriminators.

Green Team

This is the technical approach and price solution review team responsible to make sure that all the cost information is introduced in the required format as instructed in the RFP solicitation. The team should closely collaborate with the management team to determine a cost solution to convince the evaluators that the proposed price will accomplish the job.

Black Hat

This team is similar to the Red Team, although its purpose is quite different. It’s a high-level competitive intelligence review that assesses who is the competition, their strengths, and weaknesses including the score of your company and your competition are against the evaluation criteria. They use sophisticated methodologies to turn gathered information into action items. The main goal of this review team is to give a definitive approach for a successful winning strategy.

What makes an efficient color team review?

The fact that every proposal needs a professional review in order to submit a winning proposal is indisputable. Assembling the right people to conduct the review of a proposal has a significant impact on the results of the evaluation. Therefore, it’s important to consider some essential factors prior to setting the teams:

• The teams should be staffed with experienced professionals
• The teams should have the expertise to anticipate, avoid and overcome challenges
• The teams should be flexible and collaborative to ensure consistency
• The teams should be able to avoid pitfalls
• The teams should be organized, understand their core roles, and help the proposal writing team to improve the quality of the product and the evaluation score