Why we do not recommend color team proposal reviews

Warning: This article challenges things people may have learned about proposals when they got started. It's good to learn better ways of doing things. But I find it amazing how much resistance there is to change in this area and how much it holds improving proposal quality back. So forgive me if I'm a little too honest...

With the thousands of subscribers and hundreds of companies I’ve worked with, I’ve never seen one use the color team model to achieve consistently effective proposal reviews. Color team reviews are not even close to being the only way to achieve proposal quality. Frequently color team reviews cause more problems than they solve. 

Occasionally, we’ve seen companies do what amounts to inventing their own proposal review methodology, giving it color team labels, and then claiming they follow the color team methodology. But we discourage even doing that, since it carries forward some of the flaws in the color team model. 

This doesn't mean that you shouldn't have proposal reviews

The primary justification that people give for continuing to follow the color team model is that it’s better than nothing. But the alternative to color teams is not doing nothing. The alternative is a methodology that does a better job of validating the specific things that define proposal quality.

The color team review model was a great first attempt at quality control for proposals, but we now have much better methodologies for quality assurance. In fact, proposals are one of the last areas where people ignore what we've all (should have) learned from quality methodologies such as ISO, Six Sigma, and the others. Today, color team proposal reviews are mostly ineffective, obsolete, and not worth preserving. They linger on only as a bad habit, a product of resistance to changing terminology that lowers win rates.

The color team review model neither defines proposal quality nor validates its specific attributes. Color team reviews easily degrade into subjective opinion fests that provide more confirmation bias than changes to win probability. They don't even deliver the intended benefit of unbiased opinion. As a result, color team proposal reviews do not deliver quality assurance.

Color team reviews are not a best practice and it's a sign of process immaturity when companies claim them as their methodology, even if it was taught to you in a class. They stand in the way of best practice. Color team reviews are actually a bad habit that you need to change. If you’re still clinging to color team proposal reviews, here are some of the defects that lead to these conclusions.

The scope of color team proposal reviews is not well defined

Color team labels mean so many things to different people that they have become meaningless. Every proposal reviewer brings a different preconception about the scope of the review. When you use color team labels, no one really knows what you’re talking about except in the broadest sense. Each person has a different concept of the scope and is certain theirs is the right one. How are you supposed to validate the specific attributes of proposal quality if everyone defines them differently?

Most color team reviews are fishing expeditions where reviewers see what they can find. Can they find a defect? Can they find an opportunity for improvement? Reviews like this do not produce results on purpose ― they produce them by chance. How often do the opinions of reviewers conflict with each other? How often do they focus on a minor detail instead of providing the validation the proposal team needs?

Take the popular Red Team review as an example. Most Red Teams try to review: capture strategies, the proposal outline, RFP compliance, accuracy, effectiveness of the approach, persuasiveness of the writing, completeness of the document, production quality, how you stack up against the evaluation criteria, implementation of win themes, and incorporation of customer, solution, and competitive awareness. Is it any wonder that they run out of time and never fulfill their goals? Or that you can’t get participants to focus? Or prepare ahead of time? Or that they always degrade into subjective preferences when reviewers run out of time, but need to deliver feedback without admitting they didn't finish? What does it even mean to "review" a proposal?

"Read this and tell me what you think," is not a quality methodology. It's a second opinion. That's not bad to have, but it is not a quality methodology. Having an open-ended, unscoped review of undefined quality attributes is never going to produce proposal quality. Why would you even attempt to set up a proposal review process up that way?

Setting yourself up for failure

The problem is not the people performing the reviews. The problem is the defects in the model they are trying to implement. 

A proposal review model should define the scope of what is to be reviewed, the quality criteria you will assess by, and provide reliable methods for validation. The color team proposal review model doesn’t do what we really need for proposal quality assurance.

How often does the color team model end so badly that it requires another review to attempt to make up for the failure? This is not just a failure in completing the writing, it's a failure to define what the writing should be until an opinion is handed down (too late) by the reviewers. It is a failure in the color team model because it provides the definition of proposal quality after the writing. The color team model is what gives everyone working on proposals the terrible impression that we should rush to draft so that we can read the proposal and then figure out what it should have been.

There aren't enough colors

How often do color team review failures result in simply adding another review? And another? And so on until they end up submitting what they have, thrown together in a rush at the deadline? You can't fix the color team model by adding more colors. There aren’t enough colors and sit-around-a-table reviews are not the best way to validate every quality criterion.

Some companies have Blue Teams, Pink Teams, Red Teams, Green Teams, Purple Teams, Gold Teams, White Teams and occasionally other colors. Is a Pink Team review an outline review, win theme review, capture strategy review, storyboard review, progress review, draft review, production plan review, or all of the above? Is a Red Team review an early draft, a complete draft review, or the best draft we can manage to create in time review? Is the Blue Team a progress review, lead qualification review, bid/no bid review, win strategy review, or an assessment of readiness for RFP release? I've seen these reviews conducted every which way. Just never effectively. Companies define the colors according to the convenience of the moment. In practice, color teams are a subjective exercise that does not fulfill the very real need for quality validation.

Color reviews get in the way of proposal quality

Color reviews don't improve the proposal. The color model gets in the way of defining what the proposal should become and provides no way for the writers to self-assess whether they had fulfilled their assignments correctly. The color team model gets in the way of designing quality into the proposal by failing to get the writers and reviewers on the same page regarding how to define and measure proposal quality before proposal writing even starts. The reason companies don't plan before they write and then write to the plan is the color team model. 

You can't fix the defects in the color team model with better techniques

Sometimes color team reviews are advocated by someone with a particular technique they are convinced "works," but in reality only works when they implement it. A process that depends on a particular person to implement it is not a process. A process that can’t be implemented the same way twice is just a way of doing things. No matter how skilled, a review team lead is not a process, either. You need a proposal quality process and not a culture of personal dependency.

A side effect of continuing this madness is that it ensures that nearly all reviewers come into a color team review with the wrong expectations regarding what to look for and what to do about it. How is this supposed to achieve quality?

Getting everyone to have the same expectations requires change

Even if you could fix color teams, you’d still have to retrain everybody before every proposal. If your staff have been taught the color team model, you can't count on their consistent performance, no matter how skilled or well-meaning they are. They may have good eyes, but the process is irremediably flawed. And in the future, everyone who hasn't been retrained will show up trying to do things the flawed way. One of the benefits of not using color team labels is that it forces recognition that expectations have changed. There really is no other path forward.

It’s better to design quality in than to apply corrective patches against a deadline

Checking in from time to time to see if the proposal is broken so that you can fix it is one way of catching defects that should have never been made. It’s good to inspect to catch errors and you will always need to check your work. But it’s better to prevent errors in the first place. It’s even better to design out the possibility of errors. The color team model provides no way to do this. But that doesn't mean it can't be done. If you care about the quality of your proposals and realize what improving your win rate can do for your company's bottom line, this is very much worth looking into.

The color team model does not design quality into the proposal on the front end. With other proposal review models you can at least ensure that the proposal writers are using the same criteria the proposal reviewers will follow later. You can compare what was written against what it was supposed to be. But even before the reviews, the writers can use the same quality criteria the reviewers will use and prepare the right proposal the first time. 

It is possible to design quality into the very first draft of a proposal, it's just not possible using color team reviews. Adding more colors that check to see if the proposal is broken is not the same as designing quality in at the beginning.

Achieving proposal quality assurance requires other models

Designing proposal quality in at the beginning reduces the need for defect inspection. But it also requires a different model for proposal quality assurance. Instead of open-ended unscoped reviews, it requires defining what proposal quality is, the criteria used to measure it, and then building the writing process around the implementation of those criteria. To achieve quality assurance and build quality into proposal writing, your reviews must not be open-ended or unguided. 

You may also need to reconsider collaboration vs. correction and collaboration vs. objectivity. One of the supposed benefits of color team reviews is that participants are supposed to be independent. Being separate from the proposal team, they can look at the proposal with fresh eyes. However, looking at the proposal with fresh eyes when it is closer to the deadline than to the RFP release date is a bad way to try to improve quality. That's a huge source of last-minute radical course changes. Those course changes should have come much, much sooner. A quality methodology should lower risk and not raise it.

Objectivity is most relevant to validating decisions made regarding offering design and win strategies. Both should be validated very early in the proposal lifecycle and not late in the game. The after-the-fact color team model way of defining quality is terrible for making sure you are proposing the right offering. A different approach is required to validating that what you intend to offer is what will result in a winning proposal. Win strategies are often assessed during blue team, pink team, and red team reviews. More colors is not better. More subjective opinions is not better. A better approach would be to define what it will take to win as quality criteria and to measure your win strategies against those criteria.

The expertise and experience of color team participants can sometimes be more beneficial if used at the beginning, instead of much later. But then those participants are no longer objective when the review comes. Other good things can outweigh the value of objectivity in late-stage reviews. Many organizations are too small to achieve real objectivity anyway. Those organizations are better served by models that are more collaborative, and involve validating decisions as they are made instead of late-cycle corrective meetings.

The issue isn’t really objectivity, it’s quality. What is the best way to achieve quality in your organization? Is it through back-end corrections or front-end validation? Does the color team model deliver what is needed to validate that your proposal is built around what it will take to win, or does it deliver subjectivity and last-minute surprises?

There is no good time to have a Red Team

You can have your Red Team too early, or you can have it too late. If you have it too early, you are asking people to review a document that is incomplete and different from what the customer will see. If you do it too late, the document will be more mature, but you will be out of time to make any changes. If you only have one review, it can be worse than having no reviews at all.

This is why people add “pink team” reviews, or have follow-up Redder-Than-Red Team reviews. Adding colors will not solve the problems inherent in the model. Needing to add colors isn’t proof that you did the proposal wrong. It's proof that the color model has defects leading you to late-stage corrections.

Experienced opinions are still just opinions

The color team model tends to degrade to simply gathering the most experienced people available and getting their opinions. However, these people are rarely available. And when they are, they usually can’t dedicate the time that a good review requires. They don’t even come close to fully validating all of the criteria necessary to establish proposal quality. There isn’t enough time. Instead of asking them to review everything about the proposal, their experience should be focused on validating the decisions that produce the resulting proposal.  

It is not realistic to expect senior staff to be available to participate in an unlimited scoped review of every proposal a company produces. When you don’t have a definition of proposal quality or criteria to validate, this is the best you can do. But when you define proposal quality and identify quality criteria, you can involve additional staff, validate most criteria without it being a major production, and achieve better proposals as a result.

Color team reviews usually lack leadership and accountability

Color team reviews rarely address who oversees the reviews, holds reviewers accountable, calls them to order, instructs them in their mission, and teaches them how to do their job. Usually it defaults to the Proposal Manager to direct the Red Team, consisting of staff who are much more senior and difficult to direct. All while trying to produce the proposal. Separate from questionable quality practices, does this sound like a good way to manage an important corporate function?

Leadership by default is not a best practice. Every step in an effective workflow must have oversight, accountability, guidance, and training. This is the role of a leader. To be effective, every review must have one.

Better than nothing is not good enough

The primary justification for the ineffective color team model is that it is better than nothing. This is actually debatable. A strong case can be made that the color team model does more harm than good by getting in the way of planning before you write, encouraging unlimited draft cycles, creating a culture where proposal quality is subjective, and fixing proposals on the back end instead of designing quality in from the beginning. 

Instead of looking at it as if the color team model is better than nothing, isn't it better to look at it from the perspective of what people need to achieve a quality proposal and to measure the results by how it impacts your win rate?

One more defect of the color team model is that it prevents accountability. There is no way to account for what impacts your win rate when you have subjective, unscoped reviews. This leads to making decisions about how to win based on more opinions. The fulfillment of quality criteria can be quantified. 

When you look at the need to validate quality, you should be asking how quality is defined and how people will know it when they see it (other than by opinion). If you do not do this, your competitors will. Sticking with an approach that is merely better than nothing dooms your company to declining win rates. The color team model is not competitive against more professional proposal review processes.

An improved win rate is worth the investment in change. 

P.S.: If you read the above and think “That’s because they are doing it wrong. If they only did it the way I do mine it would work so much better,” you need to review the part about how a process that’s dependent on an individual person isn’t really a process. If you start by saying "I do things better and it works," then you need to reread the part about how the only way people are successful is when they create their own methodology and give it color team labels. You haven’t fixed the defects inherent in the model, you’ve just invented your own. Congratulations!