Top 5 Reasons to Keep Color Team Reviews

Recently, there have been a lot of proposal professionals questioning the value of color team reviews as part of the proposal process. They argue the field needs to move to an Agile development process. Proponents of throwing out color teams view the traditional Blue-Pink-Red-Gold process as outdated, a dinosaur due for retirement like the smoke-filled war rooms of decades past.

I believe in iterative proposal development. I go through my team’s inputs daily to provide feedback and direction. However, I feel there is still a place for maintaining color team reviews, even in today’s fast-paced, virtual world of bid management. The value of a formal review process far outweighs any benefits of abandoning the approach for an entirely iterative approach. I believe there are five key benefits to keep color teams as part of our process.

reason 1: color teams and agile development are compatible and complementary

The goal of many lean Agile development projects is to provide a minimum viable product (MVP). Articulated by Eric Reiss in his book The Lean Startup, the team puts together a product that allows the team to gather as much information on whether the solution answers a customer’s need. The MVP approach allows the team to see if the product appeals to customers before expending the cost and effort of developing a final solution.

Proposal development can easily incorporate this vision of Agile development. Each color team document becomes an MVP. The proposal reviewers stand in for your end customer, and provide feedback over how the product you have answers their needs. Then, you refine your product through the revision process to ensure you address client needs.

reason 2: getting outside opinion

Proposal teams need to get outside opinions to avoid drinking their own bathwater. Proposal teams can often live in their own truth bubbles – it’s only natural for people to think they have done great work. Writers often feel they have clearly articulated what they mean to say, which is not always what they actually say. Therefore, proposals need to be examined by people with safe distance from the bid to best judge their efforts. A formal review process makes such inputs and feedback much easier to gather than one-off, iterative review engagements.

In addition, debriefs spark creativity. First, reviewers can discuss their inputs and feedback, which can lead them to consider further ideas and suggestions. Secondly, having writers in the debrief can help generate creative solutions and ways to improve the proposal. Finally, formal reviews give the team a chance to discuss the path forward, using the review as a chance to pivot and reset as necessary.

reason 3: proposals are scored, not read

A fundamental truth of proposals is they are evaluated, not read. As I recently wrote, we do not need to tell a story, but instead see how well we will do against the Government’s evaluation criteria. A formal proposal review gives the reviewers the opportunity to do a mock scoring. I look at Red Team as a chance to have reviewers serve as evaluators. On key proposals I provide a score sheet for the reviewers to complete. It allows the proposal team to see the strengths and weaknesses. The form also asks reviewers to provide clear, actionable advice on how to “Get to Blue.” Such a review is only possible when you have a formal review window where the reviewers can do a deep dive on the document and provide clear feedback.

reason 4: compliance checks are vital

The easiest way to lose a bid is to be non-compliant. It gives the evaluator an easy out – if you don’t meet the fundamental directions of the solicitation you can be tossed on the “no” pile very, very easily. It can be hard to judge compliance using an iterative review process. The content is always changing, making it hard to nail down where exactly the writing stands. Having a set time when people can sit down with a compliance matrix and go line-by-line is critical to ensuring a proposal fully meets the terms of the solicitation. The formal color team provides the perfect opportunity to see how well a proposal matches to the requirements.

reason 5: they deserve a break today!

Writers are human. They deserve some time to reset themselves, even during a quick-turn proposal. All writing instructors teach people to put their work aside for a little while. Even a few hours away from the process can give a new perspective, allowing one to see problems that were not obvious before and come up with new ideas to improve a section. A formal review process provides the writers to get that brief time away.

conclusion

Incorporating Agile development ideas and practices into our proposal processes should be welcome. There are many great things we can learn from the move to lean development. However, we should not feel the need to abandon proposal reviews entirely. A well-run formal review process allows us to gain insights from outside our small team, improve our product, and ensure compliance more effectively than by using informal, iterative review alone.