The color team concept is familiar to many who have submitted proposals to the federal government. To those with a lot of experience, the color team process is often a source of frustration. This is because it consumes valuable time and energy, and often does not result in a better proposal. To understand why, it helps to know the origin of the term and the underlying assumptions.
During the cold war, the US military used to test strategy and weapons through war games and simulations. One team would simulate the “blue” force (in other words, the US) and the other the “red” (in other words, the Soviets). The two teams would simulate a conflict. The red team would do everything possible to defeat the blue team and, in the process, reveal the key vulnerabilities of the blue strategy or weapon system. The development teams, in real life, would then go back to work and make the system or the concept stronger, having learned how it could be defeated.
When this concept is applied to the proposal context, the red team is a group of people who simulate the government evaluators. They read the proposal document and score it for compliance and effectiveness. It sounds fine in theory. In practice, the application of the concept poses many challenges.
First, proposal teams often schedule a “pink” team before the red team, in order to be better prepared. Then, if the red team does not go well, they schedule a second red team, or a third. One organization calls the post-red red team the “merlot” team. Some companies schedule a “friendly” (meaning the reviewers do not simulate government evaluators) “blue” team to review the solution and the strategy before anyone writes the proposal. The number of colors has snowballed such that there are now not only pink and blue and red and merlot teams, but mint and green teams, as well as gold teams, some of which have multiple iterations.
And, different companies use the term differently. One person’s the blue team is someone else’s pink team. Although formal definitions exist, they are not consistently applied.
Each color review cycle consumes time and energy. The writers stop writing while those who are simulating the evaluators are reading and scoring the proposal, because if they were to keep writing, there would be a configuration and version control problem. Each review takes time to plan and schedule and execute. The red (or blue or purple or merlot) team must explain their comments to the writers after the review. Writers need time to listen to and absorb the feedback.
Most companies ignore the fact that the people who are on the red team have never, themselves, evaluated contractor proposals from the government’s perspective. Most of them have spent their entire career in industry. Their comments tend to be subjective opinions bases on individual experiences and biases. They are often heavy on judgment (“this makes no sense”) and short on specific, actionable suggestions (“put the last sentence at the beginning of the paragraph and delete the last three words”).
For this reason, the red team itself is often referred to as a “murder board” that “shreds the proposal to pieces” (these are words used to describe it to me by a colleague as recently as last week). This assumes that the proposal writers are a bunch of arrogant, self-satisfied, and lazy people who need to have their work ripped to shreds. In fact, they are often either over-committed or lacking in the right experience to really know how to create effective proposal text, and the type of critique that emerges from the red team only undermines confidence.
Finally, the traditional approach sets up the government evaluators as the enemy. Instead, bidders should be as aligned as possible with potential customers throughout the process. Referring to the government as “red” sets up the wrong framework. These are the people we are trying to help and serve, aren’t they?
It is critical for others besides the proposal writers to read and provide feedback on the proposal at different stages, and future blogposts will explore how best to do this without convening a murder board. It is both outdated (the cold war is over, after all), and ineffective.