Guides

Every competitive proposal is scored against a fixed set of criteria the government published in advance, and then a source selection official uses those scores to pick a winner. If you understand how that scoring works, you understand what you are actually writing toward. If you do not, you are guessing. Here is the short version. The government evaluates your proposal only on the factors it named in Section M of the solicitation. It rates each factor using a method it disclosed, usually adjectival or color ratings backed by written findings. Those findings, the strengths and weaknesses in your proposal, are what decide award, not the rating word by itself. This page explains where the criteria come from, how the ratings work, and how the two ways the government can make an award should change what you write. ...

A basis of estimate, or BOE, is the written explanation of how you arrived at the numbers in your cost proposal. It is the paper trail behind “we need 4,200 labor hours for this task”: what the work is, how you decomposed it, what method you used to size it, what you assumed, and why the total is credible. If someone handed you a spreadsheet and asked you to “write the BOE for your piece,” they are asking you to justify your hours in a way a skeptical stranger can follow and believe. ...

The management volume is the part of a proposal that answers a single question: can this contractor actually run the work without becoming a problem? The technical volume argues that you know how to do the job. The management volume argues that your people, your structure, and your plan will deliver it on schedule, staffed, and without drama. If you have been handed the management approach or the staffing plan to write, you are being asked to make the government confident that the day-to-day execution is in good hands. ...

A proposal graphic does a different job than the technical diagrams you are used to drawing. An architecture diagram exists to be studied by someone who already cares. A proposal graphic exists to stop a tired evaluator mid-skim, deliver one point in a few seconds, and bank it with a caption, often for a reader who is not technical. If you have been asked to produce the figures for a proposal, you are the right person for it, because you understand the work better than anyone. The shift to make is from drawing what the system looks like to drawing why your approach wins. ...

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. ...