Proposal Management Best Practices, Part 8: Conduct Review Meetings

When it comes to proposal management, there are a lot of moving pieces to manage, and organization shouldn’t be the thing that keeps your proposal from winning the bid. 

Your review team is your gate keeper; they provide feedback on where the team may have blinded themselves to certain compliance issues and solution or strategy weaknesses and if win themes hang together as a compelling story. 

A series of well-defined review meetings are a valued staple of the schedule, used as a progress check-point to keep the team on track toward success throughout the process.

The Shipley review cycle paradigm is used by many in the proposal industry, assigning color and purpose to each phase of review. For example, a Blue Team reviews the validity of the proposal outline, the Pink Team reviews the response narrative, and the Red Team reviews a more complete response narrative with draft graphics. Other teams have started using Agile Processes for their reviews. 

Whether you use Shipley, Agile, define each color for your team, or use a home grown approach, each review team should contain a progress benchmark to hold your process against and move your proposal toward the finish line. 

Draw your review team from all company corners for a blend of people who know the opportunity (feedback on strategy) and people who don’t (remove bias and blind spots by focusing on clarity and persuasiveness). 

To guide the review team outcome, give reviewers a template that outlines requirements, win themes, and scoring criteria, etc., for each section. They can check to see if that is coming through, and if it’s not… well, you’ve got a useful comment to improve the proposal. 

Schedule early, and give your review teams ample time to read and think. Try distributing review copies in smaller chunks at the end of the day. Flexibility helps, so let reviewers decide if they want to stay late or start early. 

Tip: It would kill most reviewers to know how many paper or email comments are never addressed. A better strategy is an efficient feedback loop; real-time collaboration that builds off differing perspectives, advances your benchmarks, and avoids confusion and endless revision cycles. 

Next in our series on proposal management best practices: By providing your team with easy and secure feedback throughout the process, they can focus on the quality today's evaluators are looking for rather than the process itself.