Guides

If someone told you “the pink team is Thursday” and walked off, here is what they meant. Color team reviews are staged quality checks on a proposal, each one named after a color, each one reading the document at a different point in its life and through a different lens. They run in a rough sequence as the proposal matures: an early-draft review, a near-final critique, an executive sign-off, and a final polish. The four you will hear named most often are pink, red, gold, and white glove. ...

A compliance matrix is a table that lists every requirement in a solicitation and, next to each one, exactly where in your proposal that requirement is answered. That is the whole tool. Its job is to guarantee that nothing the government asked for gets missed, because a proposal that misses a required item can be ruled non-compliant and set aside before anyone evaluates how good it is. If you have been handed a half-built spreadsheet full of “shall” statements and told to fill in your sections, this page explains what you are looking at, how the thing is built, and what your part in it actually is. ...

A technical approach section is a scored argument, not a design document and not a capability brochure. Its job is to convince an evaluator, working through a rubric, that your method for doing the work is clearly understood, lower-risk, and better value than the alternatives. Technical people pulled into proposals usually have the expertise to win. What they are missing is the translation: how to turn what they know into something that earns points. The good news is that the mistakes are predictable and the fixes are learnable. ...

These four acronyms get used interchangeably, and they should not be, because they sit at different points in how the government buys and they ask for very different things from you. Two of them are market research, where the government is not buying anything yet: a Request for Information (RFI) and a Sources Sought notice. The other two are solicitations that can lead to an actual award: a Request for Quotation (RFQ) and a Request for Proposal (RFP). Knowing which one you are looking at tells you whether a contract is even on the table, how much effort to spend, and what kind of response will land. ...

If you have been handed a government solicitation and told to “write to Section L and Section M,” here is the short version: Section L is the instructions, and Section M is the grading rubric. Section L tells you how to build and submit your proposal. Section M tells you how the government will score it. Everything you write should satisfy both at once. That is the whole idea. The rest of this page explains where those sections come from, what each one actually contains, and why reading them together is the single most important habit in proposal work. ...

In a government solicitation, a handful of small words carry all the weight. Shall, must, will, and required mark obligations you have to meet. Should marks something recommended but not mandatory. May marks something permitted but optional. Learn to read those words precisely and you can tell, sentence by sentence, what the proposal is actually on the hook for. Miss the distinction and you either skip a requirement (and risk being ruled non-compliant) or pour effort into something that was never required. ...

Three documents in federal contracting all describe the work to be done, and they get used almost interchangeably in conversation even though they are meaningfully different. A Statement of Work (SOW) tells the contractor what to do and how to do it. A Performance Work Statement (PWS) states the results required and lets the contractor decide how to achieve them. A Statement of Objectives (SOO) goes further still: the government provides only its high-level objectives, and the offeror proposes the entire approach. The single axis that separates them is who decides the “how.” ...

If you have heard someone say “we are in capture,” “the gate review is Thursday,” or “red team is next week,” you have been standing inside the Shipley process without necessarily knowing it. Shipley is the de facto industry-standard framework for how government contractors pursue and win work. At its core it is a seven-phase business development lifecycle that runs from early market research all the way through to activities after the proposal is submitted, with two different kinds of review checkpoints layered on top. Almost every term in the rest of these guides lives at some point on that timeline. ...