Color Team Reviews: A Proposal Scoring Process Checklist

Critical Red Team Findings to Watch For

• Unsubstantiated claims: Assertions like 'our proven methodology' without specific evidence, metrics, or past performance references
• Feature-focused writing: Sections that describe what you will do without explaining the benefit to the government's mission
• Inconsistencies across volumes: Technical approach referencing 12 FTEs while the staffing plan shows 10, or management approach describing processes not reflected in the technical volume
• Weak or missing proof points: Discriminators that lack concrete evidence from past performance, certifications, or measurable outcomes
• Compliance gaps: RFP instructions that are not explicitly addressed, even if the capability exists elsewhere in the proposal

Gold Team (Executive/Price Review)

The Gold Team review is where senior leadership makes the final business decision on the proposal. This review typically occurs after Red Team findings have been incorporated and the proposal is near-final. The audience is different from Red Team: these are executives, pricing leads, and business development directors who evaluate the proposal as a competitive instrument and a business commitment.

Gold Team Focus Areas

• Executive summary effectiveness: Does the executive summary tell a compelling story in under three pages? Can a non-technical reader understand why your company is the best choice?
• Price reasonableness: Is the proposed price competitive given the price-to-win analysis? Are labor rates, indirect rates, and fee structures defensible and consistent with disclosure statements?
• Risk exposure: Are there commitments in the technical volume that create unacceptable cost or schedule risk? Has the team over-promised to win the technical evaluation?
• Win theme coherence: Do the win themes resonate across all volumes? Is the value proposition clear and differentiated from likely competitors?
• Teaming commitments: Are subcontractor workshare percentages, key personnel commitments, and teaming agreement terms accurately reflected?

Gold Team is not the time for line editing or technical deep-dives. It is a strategic review. The output should be a go/no-go decision to submit, along with any final direction on pricing adjustments or executive summary refinements. If the Gold Team identifies fundamental problems at this stage, your process has a gap earlier in the pipeline that needs to be addressed for future pursuits.

White Team (Final Glove Review)

The White Team is the last line of defense before submission. It is a production-quality review, not a content review. By this point, all substantive changes should be complete. White Team reviewers are checking that the final document is mechanically perfect and submission-ready.

White Team Checklist

• Page and volume limits: Verify every volume is within the stated page count. Check font size, margins, and line spacing against the RFP's formatting instructions.
• Compliance matrix completion: Walk through the compliance matrix one final time. Every requirement should have a check mark with the corresponding page number in the proposal.
• Cross-references: All internal cross-references point to the correct sections and page numbers. Check table of contents against actual content.
• Required forms and certifications: All government-furnished forms (SF 1449, representations and certifications, etc.) are completed, signed, and dated.
• Formatting consistency: Headers, footers, section numbering, figure numbering, and table numbering are consistent throughout all volumes.
• Submission instructions: Confirm the delivery method (electronic portal, email, hardcopy), number of copies, file naming conventions, and file size limits. For electronic submissions, verify files open correctly and are not corrupted.
• Redaction and sensitivity: Ensure no tracked changes, comments, or metadata remain in the submitted documents. Verify that proprietary markings are applied as required.

White Team should be conducted at least 24-48 hours before the submission deadline. This buffer allows time to fix any issues found without the panic of a same-day deadline. Many proposal managers treat the White Team deadline as their real deadline and consider the actual government deadline as their safety margin.

Running Effective Reviews

The structure of your color team review matters as much as the content being reviewed. A poorly organized review wastes reviewer time and produces feedback that is too vague to be actionable. Here is how to set your reviews up for success.

Logistics: Who, When, How Long

Plan your color team schedule at the start of the proposal effort, not as an afterthought. Map review dates backward from the submission deadline:

• White Team: 2-3 days before submission. Half-day review session. Two to three detail-oriented reviewers.
• Gold Team: 5-7 days before submission. Two to four hour session with senior leadership. Three to five executives plus the pricing lead.
• Red Team: 10-14 days before submission. Three to five days for review, plus a full-day debrief. Four to eight reviewers depending on proposal complexity.
• Pink Team: Midpoint of the proposal schedule. Two to three days for review, half-day debrief. Three to five reviewers with technical and capture expertise.

Reviewer Briefing

Never hand reviewers a proposal and say 'tell me what you think.' Every review team needs a kickoff briefing that covers:

• Background on the opportunity—customer, incumbent, competitive landscape, and your win strategy
• The evaluation criteria from Section M, including relative weighting of factors
• Specific instructions on what feedback format to use—scorecards, comment forms, annotated PDFs
• What level of review is expected—strategic direction (Pink), scoring simulation (Red), business decision (Gold), or mechanical accuracy (White)

Scorecards and Feedback

Structured scorecards produce dramatically better feedback than open-ended comments. At minimum, your scorecard should require reviewers to:

• Assign a rating per evaluation factor using the government's own adjectival scale
• Identify at least one strength and one weakness per factor, with specific page references
• Flag any deficiency (unmet requirement) separately from weaknesses (met but inadequately)
• Provide actionable recommendations—not just 'this section is weak' but 'add a specific past performance example demonstrating X capability'

After the debrief, the proposal manager should consolidate all findings into a single action item tracker, prioritized by severity. Assign each action item to a specific author with a deadline. Track closure of every item—an unresolved Red Team deficiency that makes it into the final submission is a preventable failure.

AI-Assisted Review

Artificial intelligence is beginning to augment—not replace—human color team reviewers. When integrated thoughtfully into the review process, AI tools can handle the mechanical, repetitive aspects of review and free human reviewers to focus on strategy, persuasiveness, and competitive positioning. For a deeper look at how AI fits into the broader proposal development lifecycle, see our Compliant AI Proposal Guide.

Where AI Adds Value in Reviews

• Compliance checking: AI can parse RFP requirements and cross-reference them against proposal content to flag missing or incomplete responses. This is the single highest-value AI application in proposal review—it catches the items that human reviewers miss when reading hundreds of pages under time pressure.
• Consistency analysis: AI can identify contradictions between volumes—staffing numbers that don't match, timelines that conflict, or terminology that varies across sections. Cross-volume consistency is one of the hardest things for human reviewers to catch because each reviewer typically focuses on their assigned sections.
• Readability scoring: AI tools can evaluate sentence complexity, passive voice usage, and clarity metrics. Government evaluators reading their twentieth proposal of the day will score more favorably on proposals that are clear and easy to parse.
• Substantiation checking: AI can flag unsupported claims—sentences that assert expertise or capability without providing specific evidence, metrics, or past performance references. This helps authors strengthen weak sections before human review.
• Formatting verification: AI can automate much of the White Team checklist—checking page counts, font compliance, margin settings, and cross-reference accuracy faster and more reliably than manual review.

The key principle is that AI handles the objective, rules-based aspects of review while humans evaluate the subjective, strategic elements. AI cannot tell you whether your win theme will resonate with a specific customer or whether your technical approach is innovative relative to competitors. But it can ensure that every RFP requirement has a corresponding response and that your staffing numbers are consistent across all three volumes. When used as a pre-review quality pass, AI can significantly improve the productivity of your human review teams by eliminating low-level findings that consume valuable review time.

One important consideration: if your proposal contains CUI or other sensitive data, ensure that any AI tools used for review operate within your organization's security boundary. Uploading proposal content to public AI services may violate DFARS requirements and compromise competitive intelligence.

Color team reviews are not overhead—they are a competitive weapon. The contractors who win consistently are the ones who invest in rigorous, structured review processes that catch problems early and strengthen their proposals before submission. Every hour spent in review saves multiple hours of rework and dramatically improves your probability of winning.

Build color team reviews into every proposal schedule from day one. Train your reviewers. Use scorecards. Track findings to closure. And as AI tools mature, integrate them into your process to handle the mechanical checks while your experts focus on strategy and persuasion. For more on building a complete competitive strategy for federal contracts, return to our Winning Federal Contracts guide.