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.

This page maps the whole thing at a high level, so the vocabulary stops being a series of disconnected words and starts being a sequence you can locate yourself in.

Where it comes from

The framework comes from Shipley Associates, a consultancy that has been studying and codifying business development best practices since 1972. In the late 1990s it documented a full lifecycle, which became part of the curriculum of the APMP (the Association of Proposal Management Professionals) and spread from there into the standard vocabulary of the entire industry. The Business Development Lifecycle Guide, authored by Larry Newman, is the canonical reference.

Worth being clear about what it is and is not. Shipley is vendor methodology, not regulation. Nothing in the FAR requires you to follow it, and competing frameworks exist (Lohfeld Consulting, for instance, teaches a five-phase variant). But Shipley became the common language, which is why even teams that have never bought a Shipley guide still talk about “pink teams” and “capture plans.” When the whole industry shares a vocabulary, learning it is how you stop being lost in your own company’s meetings.

The seven phases

The lifecycle runs in seven phases, numbered zero through six. The early phases are about deciding what to chase, the middle phases about positioning and writing, and the last about what happens after you submit.

  • Phase 0, Market Segmentation. Decide which parts of the market you want to compete in.
  • Phase 1, Long-Term Positioning. Build relationships and visibility in those segments, well before any specific opportunity exists.
  • Phase 2, Opportunity Assessment. Evaluate a specific opportunity and your real probability of winning it.
  • Phase 3, Capture Planning. Shape the pursuit: understand the customer’s explicit requirements and unstated priorities, develop win strategy, build relationships, and influence the requirement before the solicitation is final.
  • Phase 4, Proposal Planning. Turn the capture work into a plan to write: the win strategy, the solution, the outline, the structure, all set before drafting begins.
  • Phase 5, Proposal Development. Write, review, and produce the actual proposal: compliant, responsive, consistent across volumes, and on time. This is the phase most people picture when they think “proposal.”
  • Phase 6, Post-Submittal. Everything after you send it in: orals, discussions, pricing strategy, and keeping the customer relationship warm through award.

The thing to notice is that the proposal itself, the part most technical contributors are pulled into, is one phase out of seven, and a late one.

Two kinds of review: gates and colors

Shipley uses two distinct review mechanisms, and people constantly conflate them. They do different jobs.

Decision Gate reviews are go/no-go checkpoints between phases. At a gate, senior leadership decides whether the opportunity is worth advancing to the next phase or whether to walk away. These are investment decisions. The bid/no-bid call, usually made at a gate around Phase 2 or 3, is one of the most consequential decisions a pursuit makes, because chasing an unwinnable contract burns money and people that a better-qualified pursuit could have used.

Color Team reviews are quality reviews of the work product. Blue, pink, red, green, gold, and white are the colors, and unlike gates, they are run by independent reviewers and aimed at making the work better rather than deciding whether to continue. The color team reviews guide covers these in detail. The short version of the distinction: a gate review decides whether to keep going, while a color review improves what you are producing. One is leadership making an investment call, the other is reviewers checking the work.

The 96 steps, and why you will not run all of them

Shipley documents 96 individual capture and proposal activities spread across the seven phases. That number tends to alarm people, so it is worth saying plainly: the 96 steps are a catalog of everything a team might do, not a checklist every pursuit must complete. They exist so nothing important gets forgotten on a large, complex bid, not to impose ceremony on a small one.

In practice, almost no one runs the full process. Smaller contractors and tight timelines compress it: collapsing phases, skipping activities, running fewer color reviews, combining pink and red into a single mid-cycle review. That is a normal and reasonable adaptation, the same way the color reviews themselves scale down on a fast bid. The discipline that matters is knowing which steps you are cutting and why, rather than cutting them by accident. The framework is a menu sized for the hardest case, and you order from it according to the pursuit in front of you.

Why capture matters more than the proposal

Here is the strategic heart of the whole framework, and the part that reorders how you should think about proposal work. According to Shipley’s own research, somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of customers already have a preferred vendor in mind before proposals are ever submitted. Win probability is highest before the solicitation is released, and it drops sharply for teams that engage late. By the proposal-planning phase, the customer’s requirements are largely locked, and a late entrant is reacting to a competition that someone else already shaped.

That is why the early phases, especially capture, carry more weight than the writing. The proposal is where you document and prove a position. Capture is where the position is actually won or lost. This is the same truth that shows up when you look at the difference between an RFP, RFI, and Sources Sought: the market-research stage, long before the RFP, is where the requirements get shaped, and showing up only at RFP release means arriving after the decisive moves have been made.

What this means if you are the technical contributor

Most of your involvement will land in Phase 5, proposal development, when the writing happens and someone hands you the technical approach or a stack of requirements to address. Understanding the full lifecycle does two things for you.

First, it explains why things are the way they are when you arrive. The win themes are already set because they were developed back in capture. The bid decision was made at a gate you were not in. Red team is staffed with outsiders because that is the design. None of it is arbitrary, and knowing the map keeps you from fighting decisions that were settled three phases ago.

Second, and more valuable, it tells you where a technical voice actually has the most leverage, which is earlier than you would expect. Phase 3 capture is where the solution gets shaped and the requirement can still be influenced. A strong technical contributor who gets involved in capture can help define the approach the entire proposal will later be built to defend. If you only ever appear in Phase 5, you are executing a strategy that other people set, often without the technical insight you could have provided when it still mattered.

The Shipley process is, in the end, a map. Every other concept in these guides, reading Section L and Section M, building the compliance matrix, running the color reviews, writing the technical approach, sits at a known point on it. Once you can see the whole sequence, you stop reacting to proposal work as a series of surprises and start recognizing where you are, what comes next, and where you could have the most effect.

The Proposal Stack is a newsletter for technical GovCon professionals who get pulled into proposal work and want to contribute well without becoming full-time proposal writers. The guides here decode the vocabulary. The newsletter covers how this plays out in practice, issue by issue. Subscribe here.