Proposal Development Process — Color Team Reviews
Introduction
If you are working in a federal contracting business, you need to understand the proposal development process. As you grow in the company, you will be expected to contribute to the company’s growth. The business development process consists of opportunity identification, qualification, capture, proposal development, and various other acquisition steps. This article only focuses on the proposal development process.
What is a proposal?
When government agencies need a product or a service, it usually solicits proposals from various eligible contractors. Specifically, in the IT contracting business, agencies require technical, management, and pricing proposal response. In recent times, some agencies require additional steps in the selection process like coding challenges, presentations, orals, etc. The proposal development process should be executed as a project, and we have to be careful in what we say in the proposal because it established contract requirements. We will have to live with and deliver on it.
Proposal Development Process
Before this process, the organization needs to decide if they want to invest in responding to the bid. There are various factors in bid decisions like company’s strategic direction, competition, relationship with the client, etc.
Assuming that your organization decided to go forward, there will be a capture process to learn client needs and prepare for how we will respond. Capture will be before the RFP is released, sometimes way before the RFP is released.
Proposal Planning Process
After the RFP is released, the proposal manager develops the outline for the response, prepares a schedule for the color team reviews, identifies authors and reviewers, writing assignments, and prepares kick-off slides.
Kick-off meeting
All the members who will be involved in contributing to the proposal will be invited to the kick-off. The kick-off meeting will be led by the proposal manager. Other member invites will be volume leads, section authors, reviewers, capture manager, and optionally some senior management staff. Proposal kick-off would include an overall summary and understanding of the opportunity, customer issues, and hot buttons, critical success factors, teaming partners, solution CONOPS, win themes, high-level approach for technical and management volumes, and the key personal.
Kick-off meetings should also explain various POCs and assignments for various sections, proposal evaluation criteria, key personal requirements, proposal development phases, graphics request and management process, a rough outline for the proposal, and most importantly, a schedule.
Blue Team Phase
After the kick-off meeting, the authors get to work on the storyboarding and coming up with high-level ideas and bullets for various proposal sections. The graphic can be hand-drawn to convey the graphic concept at this stage. Authors must complete their section by the pens-down deadline and the proposal manager does some editing and puts the content together. All the documents will be managed in content management systems like SharePoint on Google Docs. Blue team reviewers will review the blue team version of the proposal and provide feedback. After the review is complete, there will be a meeting to discuss blue team feedback with the entire team.
Pink Team Phase
During this phase, at least 70% of the proposal is complete. All the requirements are addressed with concepts with little more details than what was described in the blue team version. All the feedback and gaps must be addressed. The final pink team version should contain technical, management, and past performance sections. After the pens-down deadline, the proposal manager edits and compiles the pink team draft for the pink team review. Pink team reviewers review and provide feedback comments on various sections.
Green Team Phase 1 and 2
During the green team reviews, proposal pricing is done by a separate team by considering the actual level of the estimate, actual costs, competitor costs, clients budget, etc. Two rounds of reviews happen to draft and finalize the teams and pricing.
Red Team Phase
During this phase, 95% of the proposal should be complete. There should be no gaps in content at this point. All the graphics should be professional looking and created by a graphics team if you have one. Reviewers should review the content to ensure that they are fully compliant and make it ready for the red team reviewers by the deadline.
Gold Team Phase
During the gold phase recovery, the authors address any gaps addressed during the red team review. The proposal content should be fully compliant 100% with all final graphics.
White-Glove
The authors address any minor issues found during the gold team review. The reviewers perform one last review before submission. No major changes are allowed in this stage. Only minor word tweaks are allowed. Usually, authors are not involved in this stage. The proposal managers and reviewers take care of the changes.
Submissions
Once the senior manager or executive clears for submissions, the contracts team or account executive is authorized to submit the response electronically would fill in the pricing and other details, upload the documents as an attachment, and submits the proposal.
Summary
This article explained various steps in the proposal development process using color team reviews. These color team reviews are business development milestones that help the team members improve the win potential of an opportunity
