Color team reviews are scheduled reads of a proposal in progress, each with its own job and a color for a name. A pink team checks an early draft, a red team scores a near-final draft the way an evaluator would, and a gold team gives the final sign-off. Our read is that most teams run these reviews on time and then leave no room to act on them. A review only earns its hours if the RFP response changes afterward, so plan the fix time first.
What each color team review checks
Here’s the version we’d use. The names matter less than the last column. Every review should answer one question, and everyone in the room should know which one.
| Review | When it runs | Who reads it | The one question it answers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blue | Before writing starts | Capture lead, proposal manager and a senior seller | Is this the right strategy and outline? |
| Pink | Once an early draft exists | Proposal manager and subject experts | Are we answering the right things in the right order? |
| Red | On a near-final draft | People who haven’t seen it, holding the evaluation criteria | How would this score today? |
| Green | While the price firms up | Pricing lead and someone from delivery | Does the price hold up, and does it match the plan? |
| Gold | In the last days before submission | The executive who signs | Are we willing to put our name on this? |
| White | On the final pages | An editor | What errors are left? |
Nobody agrees on what the colors mean
There’s no rulebook behind the names, so don’t spend kickoff arguing about them. CASRAI, a research funding reference run by a U.S. nonprofit, says no funder requires a color team review by name and calls it an internal practice.
The vendor guides don’t line up either, and both of these companies sell software to proposal teams, so read them with that in mind. Loopio says a proposal should be roughly 65 to 70 percent complete after the pink team. GovDash puts the pink team at about 20 to 25 percent complete. Loopio’s white team checks spelling and grammar before submission. GovDash’s white team meets after the award decision to write down lessons learned.
Use whichever names your team already knows. Then write down what each review is for. If nobody can say, cut that review and give the hours to the fixes.
Have the red team score it
Left alone, a red team turns into a general read-through. Hand reviewers the evaluation criteria and the rating scale from the solicitation, and ask for a score on each section before any comments. A note like “tighten this up” gives a writer nothing to work with, so make every low score come with a reason.
That scale might be colors too. The codified FAR at 15.305 says federal evaluations can use “color or adjectival ratings, numerical weights, and ordinal rankings.” The FAR Overhaul text of Part 15 leaves that line out, so go by the scale your solicitation names. Your reviewers should practice on the one the panel will hold. Give them the compliance matrix as well, so they can look for every answer the way an evaluator would, and have them test the past performance section for relevance.
We built this idea into our Cardew Engineering concept, an RFQ response where a reviewer clicks any scored criterion and sees the sections that earn those points. A spreadsheet can do the plain version for your red team.
Seats help too. In our Greyfield Hauling concept, each office on a city panel reads for something different. Public Works reads for phone calls, the City Manager for risk, Procurement for responsiveness, the Sustainability Office for metric tons and the Council for the bill. Give each red team reader one of those seats and one question to carry. The same concept shows two partial answers and one exception in its compliance matrix, because an all-green matrix reads as unread. Ask your reviewers to flag anything that looks too clean.
Why a review ends up changing nothing
- It comes too late. A red team that finishes two days before the upload can only trigger small fixes. Bigger problems get noticed and shipped anyway.
- The writers review their own work. They know what they meant to say, so that’s what they read.
- Reviewers get the draft that morning. They skim, and skimmed reviews produce comments about wording.
- Comments have no owner. A long thread with no name or date beside each item is a list of things that won’t happen.
- Nobody rules on the disagreements. Two reviewers want opposite things and the writer tries to please both. One person, usually the proposal manager, should decide each one.
Put a fix window on the calendar right behind every review, and make it longer than the review. Our free RFP Timeline Planner works back from the due date and builds this in after the first review, with 8 percent of the working days for the read and 15 percent for the revisions. Adjust those shares to your bid, and guard the revision days when the schedule gets tight.
Run the last read on the laid-out pages
A lot of reviews happen in a word processor, and the evaluator never sees that file. They see a laid-out PDF or a live page, with its tables, page breaks and page count. Layout can push a section past a page limit, split a table in half or move an answer away from the page number in your matrix.
So at least one read has to happen on the finished pages. Our planner puts the final compliance check after design and production, and we’d keep it there. Have that reader open the file the way an evaluator will, and see whether the headings still make the case on their own.
Color team reviews on a commercial deal
You don’t need a government solicitation to run these. A big commercial deal has no published scoring sheet, so you borrow the buying committee instead. Give one reader the CFO’s seat, one the lawyer’s and one the operations lead who has to live with the plan. Ask each of them what would stop them from signing. Our posts on the B2B buying committee and selling to a CFO can help you brief those readers.
A use case
Take a 30-person engineering firm with 30 days to answer a county RFP, one proposal manager and nobody to spare. It can’t staff six colors, so it runs three reads and skips the names.
- Day 4, the outline. The proposal manager and one senior engineer spend an hour on the outline and the compliance matrix.
- Day 20, the scored read. Two people from outside the bid score the draft against the county’s criteria, each holding one seat on the panel. Every low score gets an owner and a date.
- Days 21 to 25, the fixes. The writers move the staffing answer, which the reviewers couldn’t find, into the section the county scores it under.
- Day 28, the final read. Once the pages are laid out, someone who hasn’t touched it goes through the PDF against every format rule and page number. That leaves a day of buffer before the upload.
Those five days of fixes only exist because the firm blocked them out at the start. Without them, the scored read would’ve been a very well-informed list of regrets.
Questions we hear about color team reviews
How many color team reviews does a proposal need?
We think three is enough for most bids. One on the outline, one scored read on a near-final draft and one final read on the laid-out pages. Add more when the size of the deal justifies the hours.
What’s the difference between a pink team and a red team?
A pink team looks at whether an early draft is answering the right things in the right order, while big changes are still cheap. A red team scores a near-final draft the way an evaluator would. Guides disagree on how complete the draft should be for each, so set the timing for your own bid.
Who should sit on a red team?
People who didn’t write it and haven’t been in the meetings. You want someone who knows the buyer’s world, someone who knows the work and someone willing to say a section is weak. An executive can join, as long as everyone else still says what they think.
How long should a red team review take?
We’d budget most of a working day for each reader, plus time to meet and sort the scores. If that sounds like too much, cut the length of the review before you cut the fix window behind it.
The short version
Color team reviews are only useful when the proposal changes afterward. Pick the reviews you need, give each one a single question, have readers score on the solicitation’s own scale and protect the days for fixes. Then run the last read on the laid-out pages. For the scoring side, read how to write a government RFP response evaluators can score.
If you’ve got a formal bid coming up and you’d rather hand off the writing and design, send us the RFP. Our Board build follows the solicitation’s numbering and includes a compliance matrix, a portal-ready PDF and a live response. See pricing.
Sources
- FAR 15.305, Proposal evaluation
- FAR Overhaul, Part 15
- CASRAI, pink team, red team and gold team review stages. The page carries a sponsor banner and sells a paid assistant.
- Loopio, guide to proposal color team reviews. Loopio sells RFP software.
- GovDash, color team review glossary entry. GovDash sells software to government contractors.
